Mary C. Henry

I think most of us in academia complain about teaching evaluations in one way or another and many articles have been written on the problems with student evaluation of instruction. Since we made the switch to online evaluations another problem is low response rates. Some faculty have "tricks" that they claim work: offering extra credit if a certain response rate is reached, threatening not to grade exams if a certain response rate is NOT reached, giving in-class time to fill them out. I've tried some of these but the rates are still quite low. For online classes it's even worse. So on top of the other issues with student evaluation of teaching, there may not be enough data either. At my university, they encourage us to use "multiple measures of teaching effectiveness" in the form of midterm evaluations of some kind. I have used Small Group Instructional Diagnosis several times to get feedback on what is and isn't working in classes. This semester I...