The literature about student ratings is vast—the largest body of literature in higher education. Our April newsletter mentioned “Tests, Fear, and Debriefing” in regard to students’ experiences with final exams. Faculty experience a counterpart at term’s end in student evaluations. Sometimes fear and distaste for evaluation occur for good reason. The problem is not so much with the forms as with the way they are often misused in the evaluative process. I’ve received queries from a number of faculty and administrators here about student evaluations, so this Nutshell comes accompanied with an expanded resource on our Center’s web site (“A Fractal Thinker Looks at Student Evaluations”—link for this compilation under continued revision is http://www.isu.edu/ctl/facultydev/extras/MeaningEvalsfract_files/MeaningEvalsfract.htm) to meet these requests. The theme of fractal thinking is one that I rarely stress in Nutshells, although I’ve explored this connection with other scholars through many articles in “National Teaching and Learning Forum.” These are available to the ISU campus community throuh http://www.ntlf.com/restricted. The fractal model offers particular insights to the topic of evaluating faculty.

To begin, there are two very different kinds of student evaluations: "formative" (those that diagnose in ways that allow professors to improve their teaching) and "summative" (those used to evaluate professors for rank, salary and tenure purposes). Formative evaluations given during the ongoing course, usually about midterm, ask detailed questions that provide a profile of pedagogy and strategy being employed. Summative evaluations given at the end of a course are direct measures of student satisfaction. "Satisfaction" is the sum of complex factors that include learning, teaching traits, and affective personal reactions.

Research reveals a general connection between cognitive gains of students and ratings . Cohen (1981) and Feldman (1989) established correlations of r = about 0.5 between student learning and student ratings. These provide strong evidence that student evaluations reflect cognitive gains and that higher ratings of teachers generally reflect better student learning.

Research also reveals a strong link between affective reactions of students and the ratings they provide. Ambady's and Rosenthal's (1993) "thin slice" studies determined that students arrived at ratings for teachers after watching 30 seconds of silent content-free video that were highly consistent (r = 0.76) with end-of-semester ratings. Further, viewing of several 3-second video segments yielded only somewhat lower correlations (r= 0.68), Content-free video clips are not reasonably associated with cognitive growth, but an explanation that affective reactions form neural networks quickly, stabilize early and persist to the end of the course seems reasonable.

Formative and summative evaluations are related. Formative evaluations profile the instructional practices at work in a class, and employment of better practices does help to increase student satisfaction. If a professor has only one hour in her/his life to improve instruction, running a formative evaluation and getting a consultation is the most productive way to spend that hour. To obtain your own hour of benefit, arrange this with Edward Nuhfer by using contact information in the masthead of this newsletter.

Knowledge surveys (Nuhfer and Knipp, 2003) are also a type of student evaluation that address a gap between summative evaluations and class tests and examinations. They derive their information from a detailed look at the content provided in a course. All knowledge surveys examined to date produce extraordinarily high measures of reliability. As in assessment of student learning, a good evaluation of teaching requires meaningful use of multiple sources of information. Summative evaluations in themselves are woefully inadequate, and a combination of summative, formative and knowledge survey data provides for more comprehensive student input.

For much more detail and access to references cited here, consult the web links at the Center’s Home Page (http://www.isu.edu/ctl/) by clicking on “Faculty” then “Resources.”