Teaching and Learning News

At SFU, the process used for student evaluation of courses and instructors hasn’t changed substantially in 30 years. Corinne Pitre-Hayes (above) is on her way to ending that dubious streak.

As leader of SFU’s Teaching and Course Evaluation Project (TCEP), Pitre-Hayes has a straightforward assignment: to recommend a replacement for the instrument (the survey form) used by the university for student evaluations of teaching and courses and to develop a best-practice guide for using and interpreting the evaluation data.

The assignment was handed to Pitre-Hayes and her team by Jon Driver, Vice-President, Academic, in December 2011 in response to recommendations by the Senate Committee on University Teaching and Learning and the Task Force on Teaching and Learning.

Valid concerns

Pitre-Hayes is aware that many members of the academic community view student evaluations – both the data gathered and the way it is used – with skepticism, and she readily enumerates the sources of concern, including doubts about reliability and validity, suspicions about bias, and worries about academic freedom. Her response, in a word, is research.

“There’s a lot of evidence in the research about the concerns that most people talk about,” she says. “These things have been researched for more than 50 years.”

She cites the common concern that evaluation results will be used inappropriately for tenure and promotion decisions. “Such decisions should not be made on the basis of teaching and course evaluations alone. That’s a key finding that surfaces repeatedly in the research. The results should be combined with other evaluative processes.”

More useful feedback

But for Pitre-Hayes, providing a better instrument and best-practice guide is only “square one.” What really excites her is the possibility of enabling faculty members and instructors to make greater formative use of the evaluation data.

“There’s this enormous opportunity that relates to teaching and learning,” she says. “We have a bunch of data here that could be incredibly useful to instructors and that we could be making constructive use of.” It’s a message she has been spreading at community consultations with administrators and faculty members in various Faculties, beginning with Education in May.

“I would like to plant the seeds for that shift [in thinking]. The key will be putting infrastructure in place that enables this to happen.”

Pitre-Hayes imagines a tool that will give instructors more control and flexibility: “I can envision instructors potentially using the instrument and the system for the purpose of getting specific student feedback regularly or on an ad hoc basis at various points of the year so that they can experiment with things in advance, during, and at the end of the course.”

The vision of an evaluation tool that responds to the requirements of individual instructors and departments will shape the recommendations of her project team: “The instrument needs the flexibility to be fine-tuned so that it’s useful for a wide variety of courses with a range of formats.”

It’s all part of her effort to move in the direction of formative uses of student evaluations in a way that she hopes instructors themselves will embrace.

Related links:

Go to the TCEP website >>

Are student evaluations of teaching simply popularity contests? Do the results of student evaluations provide any useful information?

Two reports released last week by SFU’s Teaching and Course Evaluation (TCE) Project provide context for such questions by presenting an overview of the research literature on student evaluation of teaching and courses. The first, entitled “Report on Key Research Findings,” outlines some of the broad questions and issues raised by the practice of such evaluations. For example:

• Given the multi-dimensionality of teaching, how do you define “teaching excellence” or a “good teacher”?
• Can student evaluations be valid and reliable, and can biases be avoided?
• What can be done to ensure the proper use and interpretation of evaluation results?

The second report, entitled “Report on Key Research Findings: Instrumentation,” digs deeper into questions of bias, reliability, and validity with respect to the design of evaluation questions and forms. Both reports, along with executive summaries, are available on the TCE project website.

The Teaching and Course Evaluation Project was launched in 2011 by the Office of the Vice-President, Academic, to implement the recommendations of several reports (read about the history of the project here). According to project leader Corinne Pitre-Hayes, the goal is to recommend a flexible and effective instrument for teaching and course evaluations by students and to develop guidelines and documentation for proper use and interpretation of the data generated by this instrument.

“There has been extensive scholarly research on the effective, appropriate, and responsible use of student evaluation of teaching in the 30 years since SFU first developed its evaluation forms,” says Pitre-Hayes. “We are using that research knowledge as a foundation and context to make SFU’s evaluation process more useful for instructors, administrators, and students.”

She notes that consultations with the SFU community will be an important part of the process. An initial focus group with faculty members from the Faculty of Education was held on May 31. Similar discussions will be held with members of other faculties and many other members of the community in the months ahead.

“The people we’ve talked to tend to agree that we can do better,” says Pitre-Hayes. “I’m excited to be involved with a project aimed at replacing SFU’s outdated teaching and course evaluation form with one that will be flexible to the needs of the community and can provide useful data with practical value.”

Ultimately, she says, the project is about enhancing teaching and learning at SFU by providing information that will enable instructors to engage their students more effectively.

Read more about the TCE project and view the reports on the project website: www.sfu.ca/teachingandcourseeval