My reaction to my Fall 2021 Student Evaluations

What did students like and what did they...not like.

Student evaluations are a mystery. Students fill them out at the end of the semester. Some students take it seriously, and some students believe that no one reads them. How much effort do students put into providing feedback is unknown.

Faculty, on the other hand are evaluated based on the student comments. Although the research has clearly indicated that evaluations are biased, they remain important part of our reappointment, promotion, and tenure process. Our careers are impacted by what the students report.

For my entire teaching career, I not only read the student evaluation, but I also take action from them to constantly improve and innovate my classroom. In this week’s video, I go through my evaluations from the Fall 2021 semester publicly. I hope this helps demystify student evaluations and improves the dialogue about them. For those of you interested, I will share them with you here. You can download them and read them. I hope you enjoy the YouTube video.

As always thank you for your support and following

Episode notes to reference

My working paper on Classroom Management and Student Interaction Interventions: Fostering Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in Undergraduate Economics https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3644803

Bias in student evaluations Gender biases in student evaluations of teaching by Anne Boring https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272716301591