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Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

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Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#161

Post by verroq »

snailletters wrote: post #147
YorkshireSeason wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

students rated identical teachers Did you actually read critically the papers you cite? [1] claims to be comparing "identical teachers" but [1]'s sole claim to courses taught by male and female instructors is " neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender ". Clearly those are hardly the only factors relevant to teacher quality. Moreover [1] claims to use "objective measure of…

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Surely it is worth the distinction when the contents of the article is being disputed.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#162

Post by Fomite »

paulie_a wrote: post #143
Fomite wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know we get reviewed anyway. What we're pushing back against is these reviews getting turned into yet another semi-useless, noisy and biased metric we're evaluated by. You want to recommend for/against a class to your friends? Don't care. What I'm not interested in is my dean pretending there's deep insight there.

I can understand that perspective about being used as a metric to the dean, but as a student I would have loved access to that info. It's kind like any other review system, a couple of bad reviews among many high reviews, you take that into account. but a lot of bad reviews, I'm probably going to avoid that professor, restaurant, product, service etc. It should not be used as precise metric of performance, but as a g…

> Also if you don't care about students giving praise/negative reviews to a friend, that kind of says something.

Note I didn’t say I didn’t care what those reviews were. Honestly, they’re probably more nuanced than student Evans and thus more useful in choosing classes.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#163

Post by michaelt »

jrnvs wrote: post #131
IggleSniggle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to teach in academia. Student reviews are REALLY easy to game. Give everyone As for doing nothing, and most will give you As for just being entertaining. It doesn’t matter if they learn anything, or worse, if they learn the wrong things.

But why do you let the students grade the course after they've already gotten a grade? That's insane. In my university, you'd get a paper for the teacher and course review after handing in the final exam. This means you can comment on the quality of the exam, but you don't know your grade yet.

Theoretically, if you grade students several times throughout the course, you can correct those who are on course for a poor grade (due to misunderstanding the content, or misunderstanding how much studying they need to do) while there's still time for feedback to improve their grade.

(At my school many teachers were slow to mark and return assignments, so this benefit wasn't really achieved - but it might have been had feedback been more timely)

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#164

Post by belorn »

Fomite wrote: post #135
jhasse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to give an example? Are you male or female?

I'm male. Lots of students under the impression that commenting on their dress is appropriate. A large chunk of those being suggesting they dress in ways more visually interesting. Some direct references to their appearance (usually "positive"). One particularly egregious one speculating on who she slept with to have her position. Tons of gendered expectations in language. Expectations to "be more nurturing" and thin…

> Tons of gendered expectations in language.

That would make for a rather interesting study if they look at gender expectations overall for teachers. From Swedish studies it has been clear that male teachers leave the professions significant more and earlier than female teachers, and same with male students for the teacher master program in higher education. The numbers is very similar if not almost identical to master programs in STEM except for the genders being reversed, a fact that is rather unexplored in gender studies but noted in a somewhat recent government study.

Just looking at evaluations, I wonder how height, build and wealth symbols (expensive car, clothing, jewelry) impact the rating for male teachers. Do a non-typical male traits contribute more negatively to the score for male teachers than non-typical female traits do for female teachers? Same question for typical male traits and female traits. Is it correlated to leaving the profession, and is there a difference in abuse tolerance?

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#165

Post by dorchadas »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
lliamander wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True - stricter performance evaluations aren't going to solve problems caused by a poor hiring pool.

Poor hiring pool and work mistreatment, that actively prevents teachers from teaching well, while simultaneously piling lots of bullshit work on them.

Hey, this sounds like exactly why I'm working on moving out of (secondary) teaching. I didn't mind the pay, being single on a low CoL area and the benefits were good... But the bullshit is killing me, as is the lack of respect from parents in a highly anti-intellectual county (I never realized how bad it was until I returned as a teacher) who demand that Little Johnny pass when he just wants to play Fortnite all class period and never turn in work.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#166

Post by fogetti »

snailletters wrote: post #147
YorkshireSeason wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

students rated identical teachers Did you actually read critically the papers you cite? [1] claims to be comparing "identical teachers" but [1]'s sole claim to courses taught by male and female instructors is " neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender ". Clearly those are hardly the only factors relevant to teacher quality. Moreover [1] claims to use "objective measure of…

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

It's very relevant if the OP read the article or not. Makes his/her argument stronger/weaker because the articles are used as basis for the argument. So 'Did you even read the article?' is a valid question.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#167

Post by JacKTrocinskI »

xtrapolate wrote: post #159

> "A teacher (also called a school teacher or, in some contexts, an educator) is a person who helps others to acquire knowledge, competences or values." The target audience is a crucial part of the feedback loop. Removing the students from the equation sounds counter intuitive. What are the proposed alternative metrics? Who delivers the feedback? And what is the feedback based on, if not on the direct opinions of the…

I think the main idea here is that student evaluations only make sense if we assume that students are actually interested in acquiring knowledge, competences, or values, however if their main aim in a course is a good grade then their evaluations suddenly hold little value since they will rate "easy" instructors highest.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#168

Post by sethammons »

flashman wrote: post #71
katsura wrote: post #33

To be honest, I'm not sure how teachers get and keep their jobs, but as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills. My girlfriend is studying in a distance university, so she basically never meets any of her teachers. This year she has to do practices at a chosen company, and she got a teacher assigned to her who is supposed to "help"…

> as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills If a teacher grades a student poorly, there can be repercussions. They have an incentive to grade fairly and accurately. The same isn't true of students, who can grade on feelings and grudges. Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded. Students aren't trained a…

They should be a data point. We had a professor let go due to the student evals, and that was a good thing for the university. I can see where the article and op are coming from as a former educator, but there does need to be a feedback loop.

The story on our professor. She could not communicate ideas well and proceedures worse. This was a second or third year accounting class. She would present some procedure on calculating some complex set of ratios. Students would be confused and ask for clarification on where different values came from (they seemed to originate from nowhere). She would pause. Look sideways at us. And ask I'd we new how to add and subtract, shake her head, ignore the questions, and move on. Evaluations we're the lever that students had to help correct the system.

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#169

Post by michaelt »

repsilat wrote: post #68
cortesoft wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the only thing many students feel they need from a university education is a degree. This is not surprising, given our society's constant refrain of telling everyone, "You need a college degree to get a good job". Many students are there not because they want to learn but because they want to get that piece of paper that is the ticket to a successful career. A teacher forcing them to learn, to spend time and e…

Studies show that the pay differential for "all but completed degree" and "completed degree" are stark. Researchers have said that this indicates that a large fraction of the "value" of college is just signalling (intelligence, aptitude, diligence), not education. If that's the case, many of the students in your post are right -- just giving them the degree could save them (and the school) a lot of time and money. Ma…

Well, there's a collective action problem there.

It's in every student's individual interests for their school's standards for admission and grading to be low, so they can obtain the credential easily.

But it's in the student body's _collective_ interests for the school's standards to be high, so the credential retains and improves its signalling value.

There's a reason a C- student at Harvard doesn't transfer to a deprived community college where they'd be at the top of every class :)

Re: Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students

#170

Post by nicoburns »

keithpeter wrote: post #158
katsura wrote: post #33

To be honest, I'm not sure how teachers get and keep their jobs, but as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills. My girlfriend is studying in a distance university, so she basically never meets any of her teachers. This year she has to do practices at a chosen company, and she got a teacher assigned to her who is supposed to "help"…

UK: when I was involved with teacher training at a local university, I had to act as placement tutor for around 15 training teachers - all graduates with good UK first degrees in a range of subjects. I had to observe each of the training teachers half a dozen times, and that process included checking the planning of their lessons (before the lesson!), providing feedback on the lesson itself and identifying issues to…

A big issue with education in the UK is that university lecturers generally get zero teacher training. Consequently, teaching quality at undergraduate level is widely variable.
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