Student Ratings of Faculty
Measurement and Research Services
Texas A&M University
Student Ratings of Faculty
Measurement and Research Services
Texas A&M University
Student Ratings at Texas A&M University
Student Ratings of Faculty email:
srf@unix.tamu.edu
Summary
of Course Ratings, Spring 2004
Most
Effective Teachers of 100 Level Courses
Most
Effective Teachers of 200 Level Courses
Most
Effective Teachers of 300 Level Courses
Most
Effective Teachers of 400 Level Courses
Most
Effective Teachers of 600 Level Courses
- Background
of SRF
- The
Cafeteria Model of SRF
- Student
Senate Items
- Summary
of ratings for each course
- The
Item Bank
- Research
on Student Ratings at TAMU
- Research
on Student Ratings elsewhere
Background
In 1987, President Frank E. Vandiver requested the Faculty Senate to
make recommendations for a system by which students could rate the teaching
they receive in their courses. A joint committee of the Faculty Senate
and the Student Senate, in consultatio n with Measurement and Research
Services decided to adopt a Cafeteria Model for use at Texas A&M University.
They recommended that all undergraduate courses in each of the long semesters
be rated by the students. In 1988, President William Mobley accept ed
the recommendations of the Faculty Senate. Currently, approximately two-thirds
of all undergraduate and graduate courses are rated using the Cafeteria
Model. Since 1988, the 
volume of forms produced each year
under this system has risen from 7,000 to over 330,000.
The
Cafeteria Model
assumes that there are
- multiple stakeholders in the appraisal process, and
- multiple purposes for the appraisal.
Deans, department heads, and students are three stakeholder groups whose purpose is to obtain summative information about each course. The teacher is the fourth stakeholder, but his/her purpose is often to obtain formative inf ormation to make improvements in teaching and course materials.
Reports are produced for each of the stakeholders who select items. Faculty receive reports on all items, whether or not they selected any. The other stakeholders receive reports on those and only those items they selected except for the results of the Student Senate items which are reported to the students and to the Deans and department heads. The students receive reports on only the Student Senate items.
Student
Senate Items.
The students participate in the process by having their representatives, the Student Senate, select five items to appear on all forms. These items are the m ost global ratings. The five items are:
At present, the Student Senate Items are used on student ratings forms in the colleges of Architecture, Business, Liberal Arts and in some departments in the college of Agriculture.
Results:
You will need Acrobat Reader to view the following report.
Data Summary #210: A Summary of Spring 2002 Student Ratings of Courses
by Course Level,
Data Summary #198: A Summary of Fall 1999 Student Ratings of Courses by
Course Level,
Find the ratings for a specific course or instructor,
This section is restirctied to students, faculty and staff of Texas A&M. You must log on from a computer with a campus IP number in order to gain access. Both summary results and results from individual courses are available.
Please note that these results are for the use of students, faculty and staff of Texas A&M University and viewing the results is restricted to computers with a TAMU campus IP number. Computers with campus IP numbers can be found in TAMU campus offices, labs, and dorms wired for ethernet.
View the list of instructors whom the students rated most effective in
Springl 2002
Item
Bank:
MARS is working to facilitate the selection of formative items by instructors. Currently if you are teaching in the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Architecture, the departments of Educational Psychology, Agricultural Economics, Biochemistry/Biophysics, Horticultural Science, or the English Language Institute, you may select additional items to appear on your ratings forms.
Copies of the Item Bank may be obtained here. Or you may obtain a copy from your departmental secretary, or from Ms. Beth Donavon, Measurement and Research Services, M.S. 4239, 845-0532.
Research
on Student Ratings
Survey
of Undergraduate Students Regarding Student Ratings of Faculty.
Teaching
or Research? The relationship between scholarly productivity and students'
judgments of teaching.
A Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Evaluation Association, Seattle, 1992.
Abstract:
Are teaching and research complementary aspects of scholarship or incompatible demands on faculty time and energy? This study examined the relationship between teaching effectiveness, as measured by student ratings, and measures of scholarship, such a s number of publications (authored books, edited books, journal articles, and book reviews). Faculty rank, level of course, and enrollment were also included in the analysis as background variables. A stratified random sample of 150 courses was drawn fr om all courses that were evaluated in Fall 1991 in three colleges. The sample was stratified by academic department and course level. The sample was divided into those who selected additional items for the ratings form and those who were rated solely on the departmental items. Selecting items was seen as an indication that the instructor intended to use the ratings information for formative purposes. In a previous analysis, the intended use of the ratings, whether summative only or formative and summa tive, was found to affect the size of the correlation between ratings and some background variables.
Key Words: Faculty evaluations, research productivity
Other
Research on Student Ratings
For a series of research reports and literature reviews on student ratings of faculty, please see the IDEA home page of the Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development, the Division of C ontinuing Education, Kansas State University.
- Braskamp, Larry A., Dale C. Brandenburg, and John C. Ory, (1984) Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness: A Practical Guide , Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
- Braskamp, Larry A. and John C. Ory, (1994) Assessing Faculty Work: Enhancing Individual and Institutional Performance , San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
- Centra, John A. (1993) Reflective Faculty Evaluation: Enhancing Teaching and Determining Faculty Effectiveness , San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
- Rodabaugh, R. C., & Kravitz, D. A. (1994). Effects of procedural fairness on student judgments of professors. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 5(2), 67-83.
Some other references on Faculty Evaluations:
Rodabaugh and Kravitz (cited above) reported that professors who are perceived as fair, regardless of how strict or demanding, are respected by students and rated highly. Th is holds true even when the grades for the class are lower than the campus average. Professors who are unfair in their grading are generally not liked by students even when the average grades are high. In their study, the most positive ratings were give n to professors who were described as fair, warm and good at lecturing, even though they gave an excessive amount of work and difficult tests.
In IDEA Paper No. 32, Student Ratings of Teaching: The Research Revisited (1995), Cashin summarized the conclusions of the major student rating literature covering more than 1,500 references. He concluded that
There are probably more studies of student ratings than of all of the other data used to evaluate college teaching combined. Although one can find individual studies that support almost any conclusion, for a number of variables there are enou gh studies to discern trends. In general, student ratings tend to be statistically reliable, valid, and relatively free from bias or the need for control; probably more so than any other data used for evaluation. Nevertheless, student ratings are only o ne source of data about teaching and must be used in combination with multiple sources of data if one wishes to make a judgement about all of the components of college teaching. Further, student ratings are data that must be interpreted. We should not c onfuse a source of data with the evaluators who use student rating data -- in combination with other kinds of data -- to make their judgements about an instructor's teaching effectiveness.
IDEA Paper #32 the Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development
For another excellent summary of the research, the interested reader should see Exhibit 12.1. Factors Influencing Student Ratings of the Instructor or Course. page 177 (references on the web, see: Factors Influencing Students Ratings of Instructors and Courses) and Exhibit 12.2. Relation Between Student Ratings and O ther Measures of Effective Instruction., page 182 of Braskamp and Ory (1994).
For
an alternative view on the value of student ratings of faculty, see the
arguments put forth by the Society for A Return to Academic
Standards, an organization of university faculty.
The Irascible Professor See his Comment of the day - Dec. 26, 1999
- Student evaluations of teaching - Are the inmates running the asylum?
About this page.
This page is maintained by Mark Troy.
metroy@tamu.edu