Faculty Publications

Student Evaluation Of Teaching And Matters Of Reliability

Document Type

Article

Keywords

evaluation of teaching, Reliability, student evaluation of teaching, validity

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education

Volume

43

Issue

4

First Page

666

Last Page

681

Abstract

The student evaluation of teaching process is generally thought to produce reliable results. The consistency is found within class and instructor averages, while a considerable amount of inconsistency exists with individual student responses. This paper reviews these issues along with a detailed examination of common measures of reliability that are utilised with the instruments. While inter-item consistency of the evaluations has been shown to be high, the agreement between students was shown to be no better than what would be expected by chance, indicating that students do not agree on what they are being asked to evaluate. The reliability measures generated by the student evaluations of teaching are an insufficient foundation for establishing validity. Further, the pattern of reliability indicates that the instruments are generally providing information about students, not instructors.

Department

Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Original Publication Date

5-19-2018

DOI of published version

10.1080/02602938.2017.1393495

Repository

UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Language

en

Link to Full Text

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