Sound far-fetched?

Not really in terms of student tendencies when evaluating instructors. The snap judgments students form of an instructor—based on the instructor’s appearance and mannerisms on the first day of class—can be reinforced throughout the course and influence students’ responses on course evaluations. As Merritt (2007) notes, “Enthusiastic gestures and vocal tones can mask gobbledygook, smiles count more than sample exam questions, and impressions formed in thirty seconds accurately foretell end-of-semester evaluations” (p. 18). Human bias is the culprit here. And unfortunately, bias isn’t the only factor in play.

A whole host of variables can influence student evaluation. They include:

• • The time in the semester when the evaluation is conducted
  • Percentage of students in a class who fill out the evaluation questionnaire
  • Types of questions being asked and how students interpret the questions
  • Emotions students are experiencing when completing questionnaires
  • The way the instructor handles the evaluation process
  • The ways the results of course evaluations are used

Our Main and More podcast episodes provide a bird’s eye view of the course evaluation landscape in higher education in the USA. In the Main episode, Betsy Barre gives listeners a good overview of the complexity of course evaluations and then comments, “a lot depends on why you’re using these instruments on your campus. What are you trying to actually measure with these instruments?” This is a central question. Some common uses for course evaluations are monitoring student satisfaction, reviewing teacher performance, developing the curriculum, and supporting teachers in their professional growth. Since course evaluations serve a crucial purpose, stakeholders at institutions are keenly interested in improving them to ensure they measure what they are intended to measure.

In the More episode, Beate Brunow from Penn State and Shawn Simonson from Boise State University discuss extensive, ongoing changes their institutions have made in the teacher evaluation process. Both universities recently developed teaching evaluation frameworks. The framework at Brunow’s institution, which is very similar to the framework at Simonson’s university, examines the following elements of teaching: effective course design, effective instruction, inclusive and ethical pedagogy, and reflective and evolving practice. Simonson remarked that his institution wanted a more equitable evaluation process as “faculty were being harmed by the use of this biased student evaluation of teaching,” and, additionally, excellent teaching wasn’t acknowledged. At his institution, instruction is now viewed from the student perspective, peer perspective, and instructor’s perspective. Along the same lines, Brunow noted that her university aims to reduce bias by using multiple sources of information to evaluate teaching: student feedback, peer review, and self-reflection. 

In this issue, Christine Winskowski and Curtis Kelly delve into the problems with course evaluations. Both authors provide language teachers with specific, actionable ways of managing the course evaluation process. They make a compelling case for designing and administering course-specific surveys.

And we need to remember that evaluating teachers can take many forms, including informal snap judgments in our brain. It’s easy to stereotype teachers based on their race, age, gender, nationality, etc. Focusing primarily on young teachers, Jana Kamenická reminds us to look beyond age and teaching experience to value the strengths young teachers bring to the classroom.