269 New Student Evaluation of Teaching to be Utilized at MTSU

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Feb. 7, 2008
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081

GRADING OF THE GRADERS TO CHANGE IN FALL 2008
New Student Evaluation of Teaching to be Utilized

(MURFREESBORO) – The Pedagogy Task Force has been disbanded, having completed its charge of finding ways to improve teaching across campus. The newly established Ad Hoc Pedagogy/Student Evaluation of Faculty Instrument Committee will focus on the successful implementation of the new instrument beginning in the fall semester of 2008.
The task force has worked since the fall of 2003 on ways to give students opportunities to give their professors a fuller, more holistic and more nuanced review than the one currently available. Members have presented their findings to the deans’ cabinet, the chairs’ council, the Faculty Senate and representatives of various colleges and departments.
Under the leadership of Dr. Vic Montemayor, professor of physics and astronomy, the task force received overwhelmingly positive response to an instrument developed at the University of California at Berkeley. 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.
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.”
Under the Berkeley model, 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 will be 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.”
“We’re actually quite excited about the positive aspects of the new proposed teaching evaluation instrument because it not only offers meaningful constructive

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criticism but also an avenue toward improvement,” Michael Fleming, assistant professor of recording industry and former task force co-chair, says.
The Learning, Teaching and Innovative Technologies Center is developing workshops to instruct faculty members in ways to improve their classroom performance based, in part, on the new evaluation. These workshops are to be ready by the time the first results from the new instrument are available.
The Berkeley model already was in use by the MTSU mentoring program, but Montemayor says that fact had no impact on the task force’s proposals.
The faculty evaluations will be administered in the traditional manner, in the classroom with bubble sheets, but the reporting of the results to faculty will be online.
Wendy Koenig, assistant professor of art and former task force co-chair, notes that the professors’ scores will be expressed as true percentiles of scores in their own department, college or university. The numbers also would be tracked longitudinally so that trends over time could be analyzed.
For complete information, including graphs and charts, go to http://mtsu.edu/~vjm/Teaching/Task_Force/task_force.html and click on the “Pilot Study” link.


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