A new edition of Innovate is out. The article quoted below is timely since we will be piloting a student evaluation in the Fall. Many of their findings certainly ring true with my own experience. I had no say in my course eval procedures and felt like it was just another administrative hoop I needed to leap through. That attitude most certainly tranferred to my students and likely explains how they completed the surveys so quickly (with no reflection or thought at all). While some students did take the surveys seriously, they were usually the ones who had something to gripe about. Little insight could be gleaned from such feedback other than personality differences.
Moving student evaluations online inherits challenges unrelated to technology and the Internet; instead, as is often the case, it is the migration online that puts an old issue under a new light. There remains a persistent lack of evidence that student evaluation instruments evince strategies for improvement, ostensibly their principle purpose. In fact, evidence suggests that most student course evaluation instruments may even impede improvement (Birnbaum 2000). The lack of a shared understanding of the purpose of evaluation among students, faculty, and administration underlies this concern.
Innovate - Online Student Evaluations and Response Rates Reconsidered
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