Questionnaires as interventions: Can taking a survey increase teachers’ openness to student feedback surveys?
Open accessAbstract
Administrators often struggle in getting teachers to trust their school’s evaluation practices – a necessity if teachers are to learn from the feedback they receive. We attempted to bolster teachers’ support for receiving evaluative feedback from a particularly controversial source: student-perception surveys. For our intervention, we took one of two approaches to asking 309 teachers how they felt about students evaluating their teaching practice. Control participants responded only to core questions regarding their attitudes towards student-perception surveys. Meanwhile, treatment participants were first asked whether teachers should evaluate administrators in performance reviews and were then asked the core items about student-perception surveys. Congruent with cognitive dissonance theory, this juxtaposition of questions bolstered treatment teachers’ support for using student surveys in teacher evaluations relative to the control group. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to increasing teacher openness to alternative evaluation approaches, and consider whether surveys show promise as a vehicle for delivering interventions.
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Reporting low engagement in valued action may elicit dissonance and motivate greater engagement in valued action on subsequent days.
“For example, reporting low engagement in valued action may elicit dissonance for an individual and motivate greater engagement in valued action on the subsequent day(s) [107,108].”
From Brief and Telehealth Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Interventions for Stress in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD): A Series of Single Case Experimental Design (SCED) Studies (2022) · cites this paper as [108]
The ‘Leveraging cognitive dissonance through surveys’ section says that inconsistent cognitions can cause discomfort and motivate changes in behaviour, supporting the proposed mechanism. But the Discussion reports a shift in teachers’ attitudes toward student-feedback surveys, not increased engagement in a valued action on subsequent days; the paper describes its study as lacking clear action implications. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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- Authors
- Gehlbach, H., Robinson, C. D., Finefter-Rosenbluh, I., Benshoof, C., & Schneider, J.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
- Lathrop High School, Fairbanks, AK, USA
- College of the Holy Cross (US)
- Corresponding author
- Gehlbach, Hunter
- Venue
- Educational Psychology
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2017-07-25
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 350-367
- ISSN
- 0144-3410 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-5820
- OpenAlex
- W2737688765
- Cited by
- 33
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 11.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Educational Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Monash University Research Portal (Monash University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Evaluation of Teaching Practices
- Social Sciences › Education › Student Assessment and Feedback
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Educational Assessment and Improvement
- Keywords
- teacher evaluation, student feedback, cognitive dissonance, teacher attitudes, performance evaluation (human resources)
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