Book outlines how to move beyond reliance on student surveys to evaluate, improve college teaching
LAWRENCE — Anyone who has taken or taught a college course is likely familiar with the evaluation form at the end of the semester seeking feedback on the class and instructor. While such student surveys are the norm, when used as the sole method for evaluation, they are far from the best way to gauge teaching effectiveness.
A new book co-written by two University of Kansas faculty members and colleagues at three other universities addresses that by offering guidance on implementing a better way of evaluating and improving college teaching.
The book, “Transforming College Teaching Evaluation: A Framework for Advancing Instructional Excellence,” details a seven-year undertaking to develop a more robust form of evaluation that improves teaching and learning. It also identifies strategies schools can use to overcome resistance to change and improve teaching evaluation on their own campuses.
“We had noticed that the way we measure teaching effectiveness has been poorly aligned with what we know makes teaching effective,” said Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, professor of psychology at KU and one of the co-authors. “For example, instructors spend a lot of time designing, refining and improving courses and their teaching. All of that is serious intellectual work that we want to be sure is reflected in the reward system.”
The other KU co-author, Doug Ward, associate professor of journalism & mass communications, pointed to another weakness.
“Student surveys have long focused on ‘did you like this class’ types of questions instead of the feedback teachers need to improve,” he said.
Follmer Greenhoot is director of KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, which is the hub for KU efforts to rethink teaching evaluation. Ward is an associate director at the center. They collaborated on the project with Ann Austin of Michigan State University, Noah Finkelstein of the University of Colorado and Gabriela Cornelo Weaver of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The book was published by Harvard Education Press.
While student feedback is valuable, it is far from adequate to help teachers provide the best instruction they can and document their efficacy, the authors said. Plus, research has shown such surveys contain a good deal of bias and only address one aspect of teaching. In 2017, the author team received a National Science Foundation grant to go beyond those limitations, to develop a framework and rubric for more robust and fair documentation and reward of teaching, and to support academic units and institutions in using it to change the status quo.
The rubric identifies multiple dimensions of teaching to capture a fuller range of teaching contributions, along with defined expectations and potential sources of evidence — including students, the instructor and/or peers — for each dimension.
“We see the rubric we developed for improving evaluation as a first step in building better approaches,” Follmer Greenhoot said. “We wanted evaluation that is more in line with what our institutions value in teaching excellence. The book is really about the work we’ve done to get this framework integrated into university systems.”
“Transforming” begins with a foreword by Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, then details the work of TEval, the NSF-funded project, and the framework it developed. But more than just an account of what happened at three institutions, the book is intended to help others interested in improving teaching evaluation put the project’s framework into place on their own campuses and help place improved instruction on par with other common university goals such as research and service.
The book’s chapters share cases studies from the participating universities, the unique problems they encountered and the ways they overcame those challenges. It also provides strategies for change.
“For department chairs and higher-level administrators, we provide both theories of change and practical advice on supporting faculty and using the university system to bring about improved evaluation,” Ward said.
The authors acknowledge that overreliance on student surveys has been and continues to be the norm in evaluation because it is easy and consumes little time. Similarly, implementing more robust evaluation requires more time and effort from many parties. But the book’s authors outline why it is worth the effort. They cite evidence on how biases inherent in student evaluations diminish their validity and how teachers have pushed back on the overreliance of student surveys, especially during the pandemic.
Ultimately, authors said, the book advances a holistic framework that moves beyond traditional evaluation to document, review and reward faculty work in ways that simultaneously strengthen teaching practice, support faculty and student success, and provide compelling evidence of higher education's impact. At a time of mounting skepticism about the value of college education, these approaches offer institutions some key tools to demonstrate and enhance their educational excellence.