Sociologists Caution Colleges Not to Over-Rely on Student Evaluations of Teaching

Max Whittaker for The Chronicle

The American Sociological Association released on Monday a statement laying out the problems with student evaluations of teaching and urging colleges not to over-rely on them.

“Student feedback,” says the statement, which was endorsed by 17 other scholarly associations, “should not be used alone as a measure of teaching quality. If it is used in faculty evaluation processes, it should be considered as part of a holistic assessment of teaching effectiveness.”

An extensive research literature has identified problems with student evaluations of teaching. In its statement, the association cites two key issues. For one, course evaluations don’t measure the quality of teaching particularly well. They are “weakly related to other measures,” like students’ performance on exams, the statement says, and are often used in “statistically problematic ways,” for instance assigning too much importance to small differences.

The other problem: The evaluations are biased, and “systematically disadvantage faculty from marginalized groups,” including women and minorities.

That all matters because the evaluations typically factor into colleges’ personnel decisions, such as tenure determinations, promotions, and raises. For contingent faculty members, strong evaluations can be a condition for continued employment.

In the statement, which the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, and the National Communication Association endorsed, the American Sociological Association provides a set of best practices for colleges. Among them: Ask students to give feedback about their own experiences, not assign ratings, and use evaluations to locate patterns in a professor’s teaching over time, not to compare that professor to others.

The statement also provides examples of colleges that have taken a holistic approach to assessing teaching. The University of Oregon, for instance, has created a framework that includes peer review, self-reflection, and student feedback.

This is not the first time a major scholarly association has weighed in on the question of how teaching should be evaluated. In 2013 the American Educational Research Association released a report, “Rethinking Faculty Evaluation,” that said teaching assessment should be based on what students learn. That, it said, cannot be derived from student ratings. Instead, the report said, colleges should draw on evidence from teaching portfolios, classroom observations, and surveys and interviews of both students and professors.

Further Reading From The Chronicle

The problems with course evaluations:

Research has found that students judge professors who are women more harshly than those who are men.

If course evaluations are steeped in bias, and they’re used in personnel decisions, then colleges could face litigation.

The value of student feedback:

Students can be trained to give better feedback, as in this effort at the University of California at Merced.

Kevin Gannon offers some advice for interpreting course evaluations.

Models for evaluating teaching:

Adopt a better student evaluation, says the IDEA Center.

Use an inventory of teaching practices, argues Carl Wieman, an advocate for science teaching.

Incorporate peer evaluations, suggests Philip B. Stark. That’s the direction in which the University of Southern California has recently moved.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.