Assessing Instructor Effectiveness

The conversation of Teaching Effectiveness seems to be ever present here, on many campuses and in the literature. This week, I would like to share a study which was published earlier this week, entitled, "Measuring Up: Assessing Instructor Effectiveness in Higher Education” from researchers at the University of Michigan.

In summary, the authors conclude that, “high-quality instruction didn’t necessarily predict positive feedback on student evaluations. Instead, high marks on evaluations were most positively correlated with students’ grades in a course, meaning that instructors tended to be rewarded with high ratings if they gave good grades. “This suggests that end-of-course evaluations by students are unlikely to capture much of the variation in instructor quality.”