A Possibility Model for Course Evaluations

• In Event: Who Is Part of Campus Change? Promoting Equity-Based Teaching and Student Success Through Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

A former institutional researcher will share her experience coordinating course evaluations for over 7,000 students at Suffolk University during the fall 2019 and spring 2020 semesters. Suffolk University is a private institution with historical and contemporary commitments to access, diversity, and inclusion across three schools. Suffolk coordinates college course evaluation processes like other colleges and universities to gauge instructional effectiveness and student satisfaction with course design and delivery. During the fall 2019 semester, the Sawyer Business School partnered with institutional research to pilot an online course evaluation and reduce the person-power required to administer paper-based course evaluations. Institutional research expanded the pilot to all three schools during the spring 2020 semester as the COVID-19 pandemic shifted instruction entirely online.

While course evaluations should not be the only evaluation of teaching and learning, they represent a well-established practice reinforced by accreditation standards requiring institutions to assess student learning (e.g., Higher Learning Commission, 2020). The evaluation results are used in many pivotal decisions, such as promotion and tenure (McMurtrie, 2024), further institutionalizing course evaluations into the assessment and evaluation canon (Miller & Seldin, 2014). Theoretically, course evaluation processes allow every student to provide their perspectives, supply constructive feedback to faculty, and afford instructional comparisons across course sections, instructors, and semesters. However, several valid critiques undermine course evaluations’ ability to provide valuable data, ranging from whether course evaluations can actually measure teaching (Stroebe, 2020) to systematic biases that lower the average scores of Faculty of Color and women faculty when compared to their white and men colleagues (Smith, 2007). Since course evaluations are not disappearing from assessment plans, institutions should establish partnerships among institutional research, teaching and learning, and dean’s offices to reimagine how course evaluations are coordinated, shared, and analyzed. These partnerships offer new opportunities to improve and use course evaluation data.

Three opportunities to improve course evaluations include 1) aligning course evaluation questions with survey best practices, 2) centralizing course evaluation data collected across departments and semesters, and 3) attending to systematic biases when reporting results. As many course evaluation questions employ poor measurement principles, a partnership between survey methodologists, teaching and learning experts, and social science researchers allows for the integration of survey methods (Dillman et al., 2014; Groves et al., 2009) that improve course evaluation questions. Additionally, aggregating data across departments and semesters allows for trend analyses (Hoffman, 2015) and increased statistical power for multilevel analyses. These multilevel models (Hoffman & Walters, 2022) can help clarify where systematic biases exist and negate these effects in reporting, allowing for more equitable use of course evaluations in faculty portfolios. As teaching and learning strategies are employed to increase equity, course evaluations provide an established method to assess these interventions. By partnering across teaching and learning, academic departments, and institutional research, institutions can significantly enhance the utility of college course evaluations by updating existing measures, merging with additional data, and employing multilevel modeling.

Author

• N Tennessen, University of Iowa