“A FRACTURED, SEMI-FACTUAL HISTORY OF STUDENT RATINGS OF TEACHING: The State of the Art!”

State-of-the-Art of Student Ratings
There is more research on student ratings than any other topic in higher education. More than 2,500 publications and presentations have been cited over the past 90 years. Those ratings have dominated as the primary and, frequently, only measure of teaching effectiveness at colleges and universities for the past five decades. In fact, the evaluation of teaching has been in a metaphorical cul-de-sac with student ratings as the universal barometer of teaching performance. And, if you’ve ever been in a cul-de-sac or metaphor, you know what that’s like. OMGosh, it can be Stephen Kingish terrifying.

In surveys over the past decade, it was found that 86% of U.S. liberal arts college deans and 97% of department chairs use student ratings for summative decisions about faculty. Only recently has there been a trend toward augmenting those ratings with other sources of evidence and better metaphors (Arreola, 2007; Berk, 2006; Knapper & Cranton, 2001; Seldin, 2006).

So how in the ivory tower did we get to this point? Let’s trace the major historical events. Hold on to your online administration response rates. Here we go.

A History of Student Ratings
This history covers a timeline of approximately 100 billion years, give or take a day or two, ranging from the age of dinosaurs to the age of Conan O’Brien’s new cable TV show. Obviously, it’s impossible to squish every event that occurred during that period in this series. Instead, that span is partitioned into six major eras within which salient student-ratings activities are highlighted. A blog will be devoted to each of those eras.

References

Arreola, R. A. (2007). Developing a comprehensive faculty evaluation system (3nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Berk, R. A. (2006). Thirteen strategies to measure college teaching. Sterling,VA: Stylus.
Knapper, C., & Cranton, P. (Eds). (2001). Fresh approaches to the evaluation of teaching (New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 88). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Seldin, P. (Ed.). (2006). Evaluating faculty performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

My 1st era blog will tackle prehistoric student ratings of the “Meso-Pummel Era.” How did cave men and women measure teaching performance? Their methods were a bit crude, but effective.

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