Seeking Student Comments: Why
Bother?
by Eileen Herteis
What is SEEQ?
Student Ratings and Research
Literature
An Abbreviated History . . . .
SEEQ and You
by Toni Roberts
Why bother? Acquiring feedback on
your teaching can help you . . .
SEEQ Form in PDF |
Seeking Student Comments:
Why
Bother?
Eileen Herteis, PCTC
Is there a direct, causal link between
measurement and improvement? The same
impulse that drives the overweight to their
bathroom scales seduces some universities into
believing that, by developing ever more
elaborate means of evaluation and mandating
their use, we will improve teaching.
Many of you know that I worked at University
of Saskatchewan before coming to the
Maritimes, and any rancher on the Prairies will
tell you that you don’t fatten cattle by weighing
them! No more can you can improve teaching
simply by assessing it. Many scholars (Seldin,
1999; Braskamp, Ory & Brandenberg, 1984;
Cross & Angelo, 1993) insist that evaluation
leads to improvement only when it reveals
something new to the instructor; when the
instructor is motivated to improve; when the
instructor knows how to improve.
To this excellent list, I would add my own
condition: that evaluation leads to improvement
when the instructor and the students have
confidence in the form and the process.
Clearly, forms that are poorly designed and
implemented will not lead to teaching
enhancement. Forms that ask students to
comment on or rate items beyond their scope— for example,
asking first year students to comment on the currency or mastery of
the
professor’s content knowledge—are unreliable.
Feedback that is not presented in a useable
format for the professor is unlikely to be heeded.
The
SEEQ form has been extensively tested and used in more than 50,000
courses with over one million students at both
the graduate and undergraduate levels. It is a
valid and reliable way to collect student ratings
of instruction that can lead to improvement.
An important note should be made here:
The Purdy Crawford Teaching Centre is not
involved in the summative evaluation of
teaching: that is, evaluation done for personnel
reasons, such as promotion and tenure decisions.
PCTC’s domain is formative: helping
professors who wish to seek confidential
feedback that will lead to teaching enhancement.
Perhaps the most pernicious example of teaching
assessment without reliability and validity,
indeed assessment devoid of integrity, is
“
ratemyprofessors.ca,” a treacherous, tabloid
travesty that allows students, anonymously and
with impunity, to call professors “arrogant” or
“
the worst I ever had.” Of course, there are
some—adoring yet unable to spell, bless them—who describe their professor as “a goddess” or
“ a genious.”
How unreliable is this site? Well, going back to
University of Saskatchewan, some of you may
have read the recent reports of a faculty member
dismissed from the university because of the
comments he posted about his colleagues!
Sites like “ratemyprofessors” are doubly
distasteful because they perpetuate the prevalent
and dangerous view that students are consumers
or ‘clients’ of education rather than partners in
it. Blaming a teacher alone for my poor
performance is as logical as blaming my priest
because I didn’t get into Heaven.
Let me go back to my original question: Why
bother? Because a well-designed ratings form,
like SEEQ, asks objective questions about
important aspects of teaching, not just the
easiness of a class. Because a well-designed
form gathers information that leads to teaching
enhancement—and whether we like it or not,
whether we have been teaching for four years or
forty, our students’ comments matter to us! See
Why bother? Acquiring feedback on your
teaching can help you for even more reasons to
seek student
feedback. |
