Gerry:
My experience has been somewhat different.
First, most, if not all, students who do quantitative part also provide
comments, many are quite *specific*. I find them helpful and useful because in
many cases they help to account for low/medium or high quantitative ratings.
They also demonstrate the Symbolic Interactionist principle regarding
differences in perception, interpretation
and definitions of the situation. For example, some students loved my humor
and also the way I related current events and personal experiences to
sociological concepts, theories, etc. Others preferred that I just “read
the book” to them. I could go on with other examples but won’t They
all indicated that students have differing “tastes’ regarding
teaching style and also expectations.
I take the qualitative evals. Seriously and
use some of the comments to change the course.
Michael
From: Gerry Grzyb
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006
1:53 PM
To: Michael Klausner;
[email protected]
Subject: [BULK] Re: TEACHSOC: Re:
ESPECIALLY FOR JAY AND KATHLEEN..
Importance: Low
At 09:49 AM 1/24/2006, Michael Klausner wrote:
Gerry,
They receive BOTH forms at the same time. Most fill in *both* forms. BTW, I have heard the same
from many of my colleagues. After I read comments on my Qualitative form, I was
expecting many 4’s and 5’s on the quantitative ratings but not
so. I scored just above the “school mean” on most of the
questions. Since promotion, merit raises, etc. are heavily determined by
student evaluations I’m thinking of sending the qualitative responses to
the Dean and Chair. However, they give them much less weight than the numbers.
Could it be that students are “numbed” somewhat after doing so many
quantitative forms that there is an “automatic “ averaging
effect?
Well, I'll share a few things based on my own experiences as a professor and as
member and chair of the college-level tenure and renewal committee here for
most of the 90's. I agree with much of what Kathleen said, and I don't
want to repeat it.
Until recently, we used opscan all-university student opinion forms (depts and
indivs could add their own questions, but few did), and students had
opportunity to write comments at the same time. The most notable thing
about the comments were how relatively few were received, and how non-specific they
tended to be ("X is the greatest teacher on campus!!!"). Still,
as a rule, the comments tended to be in line with the numbers from the opscan
questions, at least in general positive/negative terms. And they
sometimes--SOMETIMES--gave us clues as to why a particular professor was rated
very high or very low, although they were totally useless in explaining any
variation within the vast numbers of professors who were neither very high nor
very low. They had some limited use, then, in helping a poorly-rated person
figure out what was going wrong, and helping peers to know with some confidence
whether a professor was getting very high scores for the right reasons (e.g.,
we found one professor with very high ratings had little content in his classes
and gave almost all As and Bs, but was actually a superior "life
coach" who helped a lot of students get their act together instead of
dropping out--but you tell me if that's high scores for the right
reasons!). On the tenure committee, we relied more heavily on the quantitative
data, but only to the extent that we wanted to know if a person was in the
bottom or top decile or so. We were very aware that all sorts of things
account for variation in the vast middle, but that if someone scored REALLY low
there really was a problem, and if someone scored really high, they probably
were doing something right. Bottom line: both qualitative and
quantitative data were treated with a fair amount of suspicion.
Unfortunately, that fit with a growing emphasis on publication and a
de-emphasis of teaching, and the sad result seemed to be that nobody was
motivated to get out of students evaluations what was potentially there to be
gotten.
The de-emphasis of student evaluations received an unintended kick when a
parent at another UW campus insisted --using the open records law -- on seeing
all of the written comments that professors had received from students via the
student evaluation surveys. The university would be subject to libel
charges if it released anything libelous, so all of the comments had to be
scrutinized prior to release, and given the official CIA black marker
treatment. Want to guess how many hundreds of hours of labor were
involved in that review? I'm not sure if all campuses did this, but ours
decided "screw it--we'll never collect such comments again."
Individual professors can solicit comments if they collect them themselves, but
the university itself will not solicit them, collect them, analyze them, touch
them, or in any way be involved with them. I've since found that if we
received few comments when the university WAS collecting them, we receive even
fewer now (the last time I openly begged for them in a class of 40, I got
2). It is a rare student who believes student evaluations are taken
seriously by anyone, including students (our student government had actually
did its own surveys a few years ago, and students generally ignored those
results as well).
What we're left with here is a short set of opscan questions, which at least
have the value of taking less class time of the former set, nearly 4 times
larger. But what is missing is any kind of campus-wide commitment to
solicit student opinion in a meaningful way and to use it appropriately and
with due regard for its strengths and weaknesses as a measure of
performance.
Dr. Gerry Grzyb, Chair
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Oshkosh, WI
54901
Office: Swart 317A
920-424-2040 (Personal office)
920-424-2030 (Sociology office)
920-424-1418 (Sociology fax)
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
