236 UPGRADING THE WAY THE TEACHERS ARE GRADED

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Jan. 29, 2007
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081


Student Assessment of Professors Under Revision

(MURFREESBORO) – The questionnaire with which students assess their professors at the end of each semester is undergoing a major overhaul, but not without the ascertainment of feedback from a wide cross-section of the campus community.
The Pedagogy Task Force has been at work since the fall of 2003 on ways to reformulate the instrument so students will have the chance to provide a more precise critique, one that is more helpful in determining which educators most need improvement and in which areas.
Under the leadership of Dr. Vic Montemayor, professor of physics and astronomy, the panel presented an instrument developed by assessment experts at the University of California at Berkeley to 1,629 students, 36 faculty members and eight deans and chairs. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
One hundred percent of faculty volunteers, 100 percent of deans and chairs and 76 percent of students felt that the Berkeley-designed questionnaire was superior to the one currently in place at MTSU.
“We’re actually quite excited about the positive aspects of the new proposed teaching evaluation instrument because it not only offers meaningful constructive criticism but also an avenue toward improvement,” Michael Fleming, assistant professor of recording industry and task force co-chair, says.
The panel recommends that the Learning, Teaching and Innovative Technologies Center develop workshops to show faculty how to improve their performance in their weaker categories. These workshops would be ready by the time the first results from the new evaluation instrument are available.
“Many people view the evaluation as a means of policing the teaching that’s taking place in our classrooms, but that was not the view taken by the task force members,” Montemayor says.
As it turns out, the Berkeley instrument was already being used by the MTSU mentoring program. Even so, Montemayor says that fact had no impact on the panel’s proposals.
The current student evaluation calls for ratings of “almost always,” “usually,” “rarely,” “never,” or “not applicable” to statements such as “course requirements are clear,” “the class begins at scheduled times,” and “instructor presents material clearly.”

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Under the Berkeley rubric, more than 30 statements are divided into the categories of “Presentation Ability,” “Organization and Clarity,” “Assignments and Grading,” “Intellectual and Scholarly Approach,” “Incorporation of Student Interaction,” “Motivating the Students,” and “Effectiveness and Worth.”
Students are asked to disagree or agree on a scale of one (disagree) to five (agree) with statements such as “has a genuine interest in students,” “lectures easy to outline or case discussion well organized,” “gives assignments and exams that are reasonable in length and difficulty,” “discusses recent developments in the field,” “invites criticism of own ideas,” and “motivates me to do my best work.”
“It is more specific,” Wendy Koenig, assistant professor of art and task force co-chair, says. “It is unlikely you’re going to get perfect scores on every question.”
However, Koenig notes that the professors’ scores would be expressed as true percentiles to be compared only with other scores in their own department, college or university. The numbers also would be tracked longitudinally so that trends over time could be analyzed.
“We do not wish performance to be summarized as a single number,” Fleming says. “That’s not appropriate for any person, nor is it appropriate for any specific discipline or class or department or college.”
Koenig says Dr. Kaylene Gebert, executive vice president and provost, is supportive of the task force’s mission. The panel has presented its findings to the dean’s cabinet and plans to discuss its recommendations with the chairs’ council, the Faculty Senate, and representatives of individual colleges.
“I think that a good bit of discussion still needs to take place across campus in order for faculty to buy into the idea of this new instrument and the feedback it provides,” Montemayor says.
For complete information, including graphs and charts, go to http://physics.mtsu.edu/~vjm/task_force.html.


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