Abstract
With the worldwide implementation of students’ evaluation of teaching (SET), faculty attitudes and trust in students’ feedback as well as possible defensive (i.e., self-protective) motivations seem most relevant to the facilitation of the primary organizational goal of SET, namely, teaching improvement. A questionnaire—administered to 2241 faculty members of all ranks in two dozen varied institutions—measured positive attitudes and trust, on the one hand, and beliefs in salient negative faculty SET myths, on the other hand. The most widely-held negative attitudes concerned student fallibilities: vindictiveness; lack of maturity; and negative evaluations of low-achieving students. Despite believing in myths, more than half of the respondents reported trusting SET, thought that it accurately reflected their teaching performance, and considered SET-based feedback useful. A derived index comparing self-evaluations to reported students’ evaluations demonstrated that more than a third of the participants rated their own quality of teaching higher than the ratings they reported typically receiving from their students. This ‘underestimated’ group believed more intensely in SET myths and mistrusted it, which suggests a possible self-protective motivation underlying faculty attitudes. A subgroup of 9% felt strongly underestimated by their students, and a series of comparisons gave clear indications that, for this group of hard-core disgruntled faculty members, the administration of SET questionnaires and the provision of SET feedback are counter-productive. Insights from this research might encourage academic administrations to improve the implementation of SET measurement to increase faculty receptiveness and trust.
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Notes
The high percentage of agreement with the vindictiveness statement might have been partially influenced by the unfortunate wording of this item: "Students sometimes use evaluations to get back at lecturers". However, personal stories and narratives of close to 1000 instructors (not presented in this paper) revealed that indeed faculty members are extremely concerned about student vindictiveness.
Note that we consider the self- versus student evaluation to be a dynamic personality measure (see discussion related to self-serving biases and teacher self-image in the Introduction section) thus, the reported typical student evaluation is not assumed to be a reliable reflection of actual distributions of student evaluations.
Personal stories and open-ended narratives of close to 1000 of our respondents highlighted an additional salient fault of SET measurement that was not included in our questionnaire. Respondents were extremely concerned about the low rates of students actually filling out the SET surveys, suspecting that student samples are bent and tendentious.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Efrat Sa’ar, Yehonatan Benayoun and Itamar Shabtai, and the numerous friends and colleagues, Deans and members of the Israeli Forum of Faculty Development Centers in the various colleges and universities, who facilitated the administration of the research in their institutions.
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Hammer, R., Peer, E. & Babad, E. Faculty attitudes about student evaluations and their relations to self-image as teacher. Soc Psychol Educ 21, 517–537 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-018-9426-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-018-9426-1