Student Ratings of Instruction during the Transition to Remote Teaching
The Senate Planning and Governance Committee has approved a motion, requested by CLT as the unit responsible for the SRI process, to change the Winter, Spring, and Summer Term SRI process in light of the current global situation. Student Ratings of Instruction (SRIs) for these terms will be entirely formative. None of the results will be provided to any department heads, chairs, or deans, though the student feedback will be shared with individual instructors to help reflect on their teaching and learning experiences during these uncertain times.
For the 2020 Winter, Spring and Summer terms, the SRI forms will change in the following ways:
The question asking students for permission to use the comments provided for tenure and promotion purposes will be removed. There will be no “signed” or “unsigned” comment categories. All comments will be reported in one single report.
Messaging to students will be changed to explain that all feedback will be reported directly to the instructors.
Student Ratings of Instruction are an important part of assessing the quality of education an institution provides, but should only be one component of a holistic evaluation. Evaluations of teaching should include evidence from students (both SRI results, as well as direct evidence of students' achievement of learning outcomes), the instructors’ own self-reflection, and a peer evaluation of teaching, usually presented holistically in the form of a comprehensive Teaching Dossier.
The purposes of student ratings have largely been rooted in the goal of providing feedback to instructors on their teaching effectiveness, but have also come to be used in the formal evaluation of teaching, annual review and merit, promotion and tenure, hiring and reappointment, and the consideration of teaching awards (Linse, 2017). Student evaluations/ratings of instruction (SETs or SRIs) have always been intended to be used formatively, so that instructors could reflect on student opinions and consider adjusting their methods to better meet the needs of learners (Galbraith, Merrill, & Kline, 2012), and for this reason, many instructors and faculty members continue to value their students’ feedback for improving the quality of their teaching.
Dalhousie University has adopted the practice of including teaching dossiers for hiring and promotion decisions in an effort to expand the types of evidence used for those decisions, as have institutions across Canada and world-wide. By creating teaching dossiers, instructors are better able to describe their teaching: their approaches, decisions, and rationales. Student ratings and comments, set within this context, provide one portion of the evidence that an instructor’s teaching approach and methods are effective in the classroom, or field, or lab. There will be, however, a gap in the end of term ratings available to your Department or Faculty as a result of this move to formative feedback.
For the Winter, Spring and Summer terms, instructors can still use the formative feedback in their dossier to demonstrate the ways in which they’ve used constructive feedback from students to improve the quality of their course designs and teaching practice. Instructors may still choose to include the SRI reports provided to them for formative purposes in their teaching dossiers when applying for new positions or for reappointment, tenure, or promotion purposes, but are not required to do so. Student comments from formative processes can still provide evidence that an Instructor’s teaching approach and methods are effective.
For more information about Teaching Dossiers at Dalhousie, please our website and do not hesitate to reach out to the Centre for Learning and Teaching (clt@dal.ca) for more information.
References
Galbraith, C. S., Merrill, G. B., & Kline, D. M. (2012). Are student evaluations of teaching effectiveness valid for measuring student learning outcomes in business related classes? A neural network and Bayesian analyses. Research in Higher Education, 53(3), 353-374.
Linse, A. (2017). Interpreting and using student ratings data: Guidance for faculty serving as administrators and on evaluation committees. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54, 94-106.