The University of Southern Indiana Faculty Senate has assembled a new committee to address student evaluation in university courses. The Faculty Senate has asked the committee to address two charges regarding student evaluation of faculty teaching:
(1) Find a suitable replacement for the Purdue Cafeteria Form that we currently use. Processing and support of the Purdue Cafeteria Forms will end next year and it must be replaced with another instrument and method of processing the data.(2) Prepare a document that describes the appropriate use of data produced by student evaluation of faculty teaching. We intend to add this documentation to the faculty handbook after it has been reviewed by the Faculty & Academic Affairs Committee and the Faculty Senate.
We anticipate two or three open forums where faculty will have opportunities to comment on student evaluation of faculty teaching. We would also encourage all faculty to share comments or questions related to this topic with any member of the student evaluation of faculty teaching committee or any member of the faculty senate. We intend to complete both of these charges by the end of the current academic year.
The committee is taking advantage of a significant amount of prior work that addresses student evaluation of faculty teaching. That work was accomplished by numerous committees during the past 2 - 15 years. We have assembled much of that information and provided links that are part of this web site.
The distinction between the use of summative and formative evaluations is described in a position statement prepared by The Student Evaluation of Teaching Task Force that operated from 1999 - 2002. You can access all of the information from this committee at the web site: http://www.usi.edu/distance/set/
An evaluation of the Purdue cafeteria forms that was conducted by James Divine in 1990 is available here. USI faculty were surveyed about the Purdue Cafeteria form in January 2002. These findings are presented in two documents: a summary of responses to the survey and written comments on the survey. Instructional
Assessment System (IAS) from the University of Washington
Teacher-Course
Evaluation Questionnaire (AZTEQ) from the University of Arizona
Student
Instructional Report II from the Educational Testing Service
IDEA
Student Ratings of Instruction from Kansas State University
A thorough review of these and other instruments is presented in Student
Ratings of Instruction--Report and Recommendation by the Office of
Institutional Research of the Suffolk County Community College of New
York. It includes examination of both reliability and validity of
various instruments, elements of bias, limitations, applications, and
costs.
USI is also a partner of the BeTA Project. From their website: "The BeTA project is sponsored in part by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)- which is part of the U.S. Department of Education. The BeTA projects supports the development of better assessment strategies for gathering student feedback about courses and faculty."
Three articles from the journal College Teaching address the student evaluation of faculty teaching:
"Guarding Against Potential Bias in Student Evaluations" - T. Baldwin & N. Blattner, College Teaching, 51, 1, (2003), pp 26-32.
"Student Evaluation of College Teaching: A Practice in Search of Principles" - B. Algozzine, et al., College Teaching, 52, 4, (2004), pp 134-141.
"Understanding Student Evaluations" - S. Hobson & D.Talbot, College Teaching, 49, 1, (2001), pp 26-31.
The Committee
Karen Bonnell
Nadine Coudret
Jim Divine
Maurice Hamington
Joyce Hamon
Mohammed Khayam
Mark Krahling
Aimee Luebben
Nancy Myers
Joe Palladino
Iris Phillips
Tim Schibik
Ann White
Bill Wilding
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