Navigating Teaching Evaluations: Interpret to Improve Pedagogy or Ignore to Improve Wellness?

Introduction

Although referred to differently at different learning institutions, the “holy triad” refers to the breakdown of teaching, research, and service expected of a faculty member during one year of employment. These percentages (totaling 100%) may differ among faculty, across institutions, and year-to-year for each faculty member. Regardless, teaching usually plays a portion for each faculty member within the academy. Quality teaching is, therefore, an institutional value (Austin, 2002), and the measurement of good teaching varies in intensity. Whether teaching hard skills or soft skills, core classes or electives, undergraduate or graduate students, most courses involve a similar component--student evaluations of teaching (SET; Rosen, 2018). The administration of these questionnaires can be either electronically, or through the use of paper and pencil. The questionnaires provide students with the opportunity to give feedback regarding the professor, thus holding the professor and their universities to account (Arthur, 2009) for the practices and professionalism for each course, which provides evaluation measures for students. The instruments tend to utilize Likert-type scales, providing an overall average score for specific areas of teaching and the course overall (Matosas-López et al., 2019). Many offer a qualitative component in the form of open-ended questions in which students can submit a personalized response.

The evaluations provide both a formative and summative purpose (Spooren et al., 2013). Improving one’s teaching techniques and style as the formative purpose, with administrative decision-making and determination serving as the summative (Matosas-López et al., 2019). Since the first article in the American Association of University Professors in which McKeachie (1969) determined that benefit would come from systematic feedback from students to best inform teaching practice, the applicability of the feedback improving teaching performance has been controversial (Braunstein et al., 1973). In fact, by the late 1990s, over 2,000 articles were published on the topic of SET (Wilson, 1998), demonstrating the impact of the implementation of these assessments as a measure of teaching efficacy.

With teaching evaluations serving as both formative and summative, doctoral graduates new to the profession will want to better understand the research (and discourse) surrounding SET, different types of SET and their uses, ways to incorporate SET feedback into their teaching practice, ways in which SET may be used in their institution, and methods for coping with negative evaluations. This chapter provides information for each of these areas, along with unique perspectives regarding SET from individuals in their first years in the profession.