This chapter reports a study that examines the differential effects of gender in teacher quality evaluations among Colombian students. Men and women rated teacher performance differently. Gender can be a moderating variable that better predicts the outcomes of such evaluations compared to commitment or academic performance.

Provides suggestions for how faculty can encourage students to take faculty evaluations seriously and to provide thoughtful and constructive criticism. (EV)

Describes student quality teams as a way to help faculty make the process of getting student feedback more reflective and collaborative. (EV)

Discusses written comments by students on faculty evaluations and suggests how faculty can organize them to provide usable feedback to improve their teaching and student learning. (EV)

Offers suggestions about how faculty can incorporate technology into midsemester student feedback, asserting that it gives students more opportunities to provide input. (EV)

Offers suggestions for writing student rating scale questions that target individual faculty needs and interests. (EV)

Describes a streamlined process for using student focus groups to obtain student feedback on faculty and course effectiveness. (EV)

Examines some simple and more complicated ways for faculty to obtain meaningful feedback in the middle of the semester, while there is still time to make changes for the students in that class. (EV)

Provides information about how faculty can use the data on their own student ratings to develop a narrative that will help others (such as administrators and the public) understand what the numbers mean and how they should and should not be used. (EV)

Eight of the most common faculty concerns about student evaluations of instruction are discussed: inconsistent student judgments, the perception that only colleagues are qualified to evaluate peers' instruction, student-rating schemes as popularity contests, unreliable and invalid student-rating forms, etc. Research shows that faculty concerns are…

An annotated bibliography on instructional evaluation and improvement is presented. The bibliography was compiled with an explicit bias toward the inclusion of articles that applied methodological techniques that are relatively uncommon in the instructional literature. (MLW)

Instructional improvement programs are most likely to be effective if, in addition to providing feedback to instructors, there is a system of institutional support, reward, and training. The instructor must be educated in how to conceptualize, interpret, and apply feedback information. (Author/MLW)

Six evaluation methods are discussed: student ratings, colleague evaluations, definitions of good teaching, teacher-designed examinations, evaluation of research and scholarship, and the politics of evaluation. (Author/MLW)

College teaching effectiveness, as perceived by students, can be predicted from specific, observable classroom behaviors of the instructor and can be improved through feedback and training procedures designed to modify these behaviors. (Author/MSE)

Research on college teaching supports classifying teaching as much an art as a science. The expectation that student evaluation of teachers can result in exact teacher rankings is unrealistic and stifles the artistry in teaching. However, current evaluation techniques can yield broader classifications of effectiveness and help improve instruction.…