Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness

Anne Boring · Kellie Ottoboni · Philip B. Stark

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Evaluation of Teaching Practices Educational Technology and Pedagogy Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research

Abstract

Abstract Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in academic personnel decisions as a measure of teaching effectiveness. We show: SET are biased against female instructors by an amount that is large and statistically significant. The bias affects how students rate even putatively objective aspects of teaching, such as how promptly assignments are graded. The bias varies by discipline and by student gender, among other things. It is not possible to adjust for the bias, because it depends on so many factors. SET are more sensitive to students’ gender bias and grade expectations than they are to teaching effectiveness. Gender biases can be large enough to cause more effective instructors to get lower SET than less effective instructors. These findings are based on nonparametric statistical tests applied to two datasets: 23,001 SET of 379 instructors by 4,423 students in six mandatory first-year courses in a five-year natural experiment at a French university, and 43 SET for four sections of an online course in a randomized, controlled, blind experiment at a US university.

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References

1997Making students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: The critical issues of validity, bias, and utility.2014What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching 2010Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors

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2017Student evaluations of teaching are an inadequate assessment tool for evaluating faculty performance 2019Gender and cultural bias in student evaluations: Why representation matters 2021Sexism, racism, prejudice, and bias: a literature review and synthesis of research surrounding student evaluations of courses and teaching 2019Does the Flipped Classroom Improve Student Learning and Satisfaction? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis 2021Evaluating Student Evaluations of Teaching: a Review of Measurement and Equity Bias in SETs and Recommendations for Ethical Reform 2020Student Evaluations of Teaching Encourages Poor Teaching and Contributes to Grade Inflation: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis 2019Scaling Down Inequality: Rating Scales, Gender Bias, and the Architecture of Evaluation 2019‘Not one of the family’: Gender and precarious work in the neoliberal university

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