August 16, 1998
Researchers to debate value of student evaluations in San Diego
SAN DIEGO — The renewed controversy over the value of student evaluations of college professors will be debated by six researchers from the United States, Canada and Australia here Friday starting at 8:15 a.m. at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The two-hour debate was triggered by new studies conducted by two University of Washington researchers, Anthony Greenwald and Gerald Gillmore. Their findings that instructors who teach demanding courses — usually concentrated in science, mathematics and engineering — are often penalized with undeservedly low ratings, while teachers of easier courses are often rewarded with unfairly high ratings challenged prevailing academic opinion holding that evaluations are a fair measuring tool.
Generally, student ratings remain the single most important source of information used in evaluating teaching. These evaluations, in turn, also influence important personnel decisions such as merit pay increases, promotions and tenure.
Greenwald, a professor of psychology, and Gillmore, director of the UW’s office of educational assessment, will debate their findings against two teams defending the
current evaluation system. One team will be made up of Sylvia d’Apollonia and Philip Abrami, both professors of education at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. The other team is composed of Herbert Marsh, a professor of education, and Lawrence Roche, a doctoral student in education, from the University of Western Sydney, in MacArthur, Australia. Wilbert McKeachie, a University of Michigan psychology professor, will moderate the debate.
The research by Greenwald and Gillmore, which was published last winter in the American Psychologist and the Journal of Educational Psychology, reopened the simmering issue around the accuracy and value of evaluations.
“Our research has confirmed what critics of student ratings have long suspected, that grading leniency affects ratings,” says Gillmore. “All other things being equal, a professor can get higher ratings by giving higher grades.”
“One likely impact is that evaluations may encourage faculty to grade easier and make course workloads lighter to get higher evaluations,” adds Greenwald. “The end effect to the consumer, the student, may not really serve the educational system or society.”
Despite the shortcomings in most rating systems now being used, the UW researchers don’t advocate abandoning student evaluations. They believe that ratings are needed and clearly have valid components. What they propose is to reform how ratings are done, and a number of their ideas already have been incorporated into the evaluation forms now used at the University of Washington.
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For more information, contact Greenwald at (206) 543-7227 or agg@u.washington.edu
Gillmore at (206) 543-9955 or oea@u.washington.edu.
A supplementary overview of their research is available on the world wide web at http://weber.u.washington.edu/~agg/paingain/supplement.html.
