Student Ratings of Instruction

There was a time when research on student ratings of instruction seemed a special prerogative of the psychologist. Psychologists broke the ground in this area a halfcentury ago, and they worked the land, unaided, for many years. From their research results, they forged a consensus about student ratings of instruction: student ratings provide a reliable, convenient, useful, and probably valid method for evaluating teacher performance (Guthrie, 1954; Remmers, 1963; McKeachie, 1969; Costin, Greenough, and Menges, 197.). In recent years, teachers from a variety of disciplines have joined psychologists in research on student ratings of instruction. Books on course evaluation have been written by teachers of English and professors of zoology. Engineers and doctors have studied course ratings. And the consensus that psychology built has been eroding. Two recent studies have been widely quoted. In the first of these, Rodin and Rodin (1972) set out to determine the relation between instructors’ ratings and the amount students learned in a course. The instructors were eleven teaching assistants in a large undergraduate calculus class of about 300 students. The teaching assistants met with students in recitation sections for about two hours a week. All instructors were evaluated on a common rating form, and all students took a common examination. The nub of the research findings is conveyed by the article’s subtitle, “Students rate most highly instructors from whom they learn least.”The Rodins found a correlation of-.75 between instructor ratings and class examination performance. The instructors with the three lowest student ratings taught the three classes with the highest examination scores. The instructor with the highest student ratings taught the class with the lowest examination score. Rodin and Rodin conclude: “If how much students learn is considered to be a major component of good teaching, it must be concluded that good teaching is not validly measured by student evaluations in their current form” (p. 1166). A recent study by Naftulin, Ware, and Donnelly (1973) is also unsettling. These authors felt that in a situation involving new learning, a stylish but empty lecture would seduce even a highly sophisticated group of students into feelings of satisfaction with their learning. They asked an actor to deliver a “charismatic but nonsubstantive” lecture on Anatol Rapoport’s Theory of Games, a topic about which