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An evaluation of course evaluations
Open accessAbstract
Abstract Student ratings of teaching have been used, studied, and debated for almost a century. This article examines student ratings of teaching from a statistical perspective. The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of “effectiveness” do not measure teaching effectiveness. Response rates and response variability matter. And comparing averages of categorical responses, even if the categories are represented by numbers, makes little sense. Student ratings of teaching are valuable when they ask the right questions, report response rates and score distributions, and are balanced by a variety of other sources and methods to evaluate teaching.
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“However, this approach is prone to confounds, thus risking obtaining spurious results that do not underlie a genuine causal relationship.”
From The L2 motivational self system: A meta-analysis (2018) · cites this paper as Stark & Freishtat, 2014
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Research works printed but not linked: 31
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The L2 motivational self system: A meta-analysis
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Metadata
- Authors
- Stark, P. B., & Freishtat, R.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- ORCID
- Stark, Philip B.
- Venue
- ScienceOpen Research
- Publisher
- ScienceOpen
- Published
- 2014-09-29
- Volume
- 0
- Issue
- 0
- ISSN
- 2199-1006 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2131464571
- Cited by
- 220
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 25 · 2018: 19 · 2017: 26 · 2016: 22 · 2015: 9
- FWCI
- 97.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- ScienceOpen Research (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Evaluation of Teaching Practices
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Statistics Education and Methodologies
- Social Sciences › Education › Educational Technology and Pedagogy
- Keywords
- student ratings of teaching, course evaluation, teaching effectiveness, response rate, score distribution, measurement validity, faculty evaluation
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