Poster #78 - Gathering formative feedback on college teaching: Evidence-based mid-semester evaluation in higher education classrooms

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Mid-semester evaluation (MSE) feedback from students on college teaching effectiveness can be used immediately to benefit the students in the current term (Lewis, 2001). MSE feedback is typically gathered half-way through the course, and the results are only reported to the instructor for improvements in their practice, and not to department chairs or deans. Therefore, it can be thought of as formative rather than summative evaluation (Royse et al., 2006).

Valid teaching evaluation measures based on the literature and strong psychometric analyses are beneficial to college instructors - allowing them to be more confident in the feedback they receive from students (Oon, Spencer, & Kam, 2017). However, in our search we found no published MSE instruments that are grounded in education literature, and that have held up to psychometric scrutiny. In light of this gap, we constructed and psychometrically assessed a brief evaluation measure designed to be used for MSEs of college.

Evaluations of teaching are more beneficial if they are multi-dimensional, and provide feedback on more than one aspect of teaching (Spooren, Vandermoere, Vanderstraeten, & Pepermans, 2017). When determining what aspects of teaching to assess, we turn to education frameworks that indicate ways instructors can promote student motivation and engagement such as the Self-System Model of Motivational Development (SSMMD; Skinner, Furrer, Marchand, & Kinderman, 2008), and Expectancy-Value Theory (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000). Taken together, this foundational literature indicates that teaching is most effective when it takes place in warm climates that are supportive for learning (Zumbrunn, McKim, Buhs, & Hawley, 2014), includes content that students value and are able to understand (Corkin, Horn, & Pattison, 2017), evidence-based teaching practices such as the inclusion of active learning (Alexander & Winne, 2006), and valid assessment strategies that provides guiding feedback to students (Pellegrino, DiBello, & Goldman, 2016). We have constructed a definition of effective teaching based on four essential pieces: climate, content, practice, and assessment (authors, under review).

The MSE scale has one subscale for each of these pieces of effective teaching (see Table 1). Experts in the field of education collaborated to write the items in ways that maximize content validity. We collected data from 1,351 undergraduate students (58.19% female, 48.94% White) across 27 courses at a large state university across two semesters. Data were collected via online survey during class time, midway through the Fall and Spring semesters.

Multi-level confirmatory factor analyses with students (level 1) nested in instructors (level 2) reveal that a four-factor solution (2=197.44, p < .01, AIC= 42355.20, RMSEA=.04, CFI=.98, SRMR=.03; See Figure 1) fits the data well, and better than a one-factor solution (2=519.80, p < .01, AIC= 42908.01, RMSEA=.07, CFI=.94, SRMR=.05). Further, the model did not vary significantly by instructor gender. Our findings suggest that our scale may be a useful tool for instructors to gain information from their students on how to improve their practice. The full scale will be provided, and implications for future research will be discussed.

Authors

• Alice E. Donlan, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Virginia L. Byrne, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author