Online Tool Offers a New Angle on Student Evaluations

Katherine Friedrich

Bob Mathieu, CIRTL's Principal Investigator, presented a research-based viewpoint on the relevance of student evaluations on the evening of Sept. 17 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Delta Program’s Roundtable.

Mathieu worked together with educational researcher Elaine Seymour and others to develop an online tool called the Student Assessment of Learning Gains, or SALG. The SALG was designed to encourage universities to assess how effectively their students learned rather than assessing how their faculty performed in class.

"How well the professor did is quite irrelevant," Mathieu said. He said Seymour observed that typical student evaluation questions (i.e., "Did you like this course?") don't indicate whether students are learning – or what teaching methods are most effective. "Most of the questions are about the professor."

Seymour found students' self-evaluations of their own learning correlated well with other measures of student learning. Out of this concept, the SALG was born. Seymour and her colleagues developed questions targeted to assess students' perspectives on their own educational progress – essentially, to reveal whether a course is achieving its goals. 

"Students are capable of evaluating their own learning gains," Mathieu said. Typical questions that the SALG asks include, "How much did the following aspects of the course help you in your learning? As a result of your work in this class, what gains did you make in the following skills?" Student responses to these questions yield much more productive information for faculty than many standard evaluations do.

Graduate students expressed a variety of reactions during the dinner discussion. Heidi Bissell, a zoology doctoral student with extensive teaching experience, said she appreciated the SALG because it provides "vetted" questions. However, she said in-person observation by faculty peers may be a more useful device for evaluation than student feedback forms.

Should student satisfaction or teaching effectiveness be weighted more heavily when committees consider promotions? Some graduate students said that meeting standards of professionalism is important in a university setting and that both criteria should be taken into account.

Although thousands of instructors have used the SALG since it appeared online, departments sometimes insist that they paste in standard evaluation questions. "Our most common request was 'I wanted to put in my departmental evaluation form,'" Mathieu said. In response to these concerns, Seymour's research team is developing a departmental SALG which will encourage both faculty and departmental leaders to use this model.

With new funding from the National Science Foundation, the SALG is being updated. It contains powerful qualitative analysis tools as well as quantitative statistics. The new URL is http://www.salgsite.org/.

September 24, 2008

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