Jared Ballard, a student at Utah State University checks his emails 2-3 times a day. As he does so, he once again finds an electronic course evaluation waiting for him in his inbox. He has deleted the previous evaluations multiple times, refusing to fill them out.
The deadline for student course evaluations is approaching and the question of how effective they will be remains.
However, there is a method behind this generally disliked new change. Extensive research has been done by the Faculty Evaluations Committee of the Faculty Senate, according to Michael Torrens the director of the Analysis, Assessment & Accreditation department also known as AAA.
Torrens has worked closely with this committee throughout the process of changing the evaluations from paper to online.
The new course evaluations are called the Individual Development and Educational Assessments also known as IDEA.
Improvements have been made to the current online evaluations that will help establish a more critical analysis. The evaluations now include an assessment of the learning objectives that teachers claim to have taught their students throughout the course.
“This is a new and important improvement that has implications for USU’s efforts to improve courses, and for our internal assessment and accreditation processes,” Torrens said.
One of the most important aspects of the course evaluations is the fact that they have proven to provide more validity and reliability than any other student rating system, according to Torrens.
“They process over 3 million forms representing more than 200,000 classes at hundreds of colleges and universities annually. This volume of data provides an ability for research and testing that greatly exceeds anything available to USU alone,” according to USU’s AAA department.
In turn, this data will allow comparisons to other university’s courses across the nation that are similar to those at USU. According to Torrens, the online method will prevent human or machine error since the forms are being evaluated by the same system and method.
Although this system would appear to be more effective, statistically the question of whether students will do them is yet to be answered.
According to a study titled Online Course Evaluation Literature Review and Findings conducted by Columbia University in the Spring of 2011, “Evaluation scores have not been shown to change when evaluations are completed online rather than on paper, even though response rates have been shown to decrease from paper to online delivery.”
The study also showed that students will leave more meaningful responses when done online as opposed to paper. And once the online evaluations are put in place students and faculty view them more positively than the old paper method.
Professor Tonya Triplett of USU addressed her thoughts on the ideas of students’ grades reflecting how they would fill out their course evaluations for her class. She suspected that a student’s grade may have some impact on the way they fill out their evaluations, and in a way she was correct, however the effect is low.
According to that same study “Grades do not have as large of an effect as do how much students feel they’ve learned, how much they felt stimulated by the class, and whether the class was appropriately difficult.”
Also, “Contrary to the “retaliation” theory, students who do poorly in a class are equally or less likely than those who do well to complete course evaluations.”
A digital summary will be available to the students through the AAA department with an assessment of each course after they have been properly evaluated.
The feedback and analysis of the current semester will not be ready until spring.
“It’s really too early to tell. We’ll have a better sense when the evaluation process is complete for this first semester of implementation,” Torrens said.
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