FOR RELEASE: Sept. 19, 1997
Contact: Susan Lang
Office: (607) 255-3613
Internet: [email protected]
Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Attention teachers far and wide: It may not be so much
what or how you teach that will reap high student evaluations, but
something as simple as an enthusiastic tone of voice. And beware,
administrators, if you use student ratings to judge teachers: Although
student evaluations may be systematic and reliable, a Cornell University
study has found that they can be totally invalid. Yet many schools use
them to determine tenure, promotion, pay hikes and awards.
These warnings stem from a new study in which a Cornell professor taught
the identical course twice with one exception -- he used a more
enthusiastic tone of voice the second semester -- and student ratings
soared on every measure that second semester.
Those second-semester students gave much higher ratings not only on how
knowledgeable and tolerant the professor was and on how much they say they
learned, but even on factors such as the fairness of grading policies, text
quality, professor organization, course goals and professor accessibility.
And although the 249 students in the second-semester course said they
learned more than the 229 students the previous semester believed they had
learned, the two groups performed no differently on exams and other
assessment measures.
"This study suggests that factors totally unrelated to actual teaching
effectiveness, such as the variation in a professor's voice, can exert a
sizable influence on student ratings of that same professor's knowledge,
organization, grading fairness, etc.," said Wendy M. Williams, associate
professor of human development at Cornell. Her colleague and co-author,
Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell, was the teacher
evaluated by the students in a course on developmental psychology that he
has taught for almost 20 years.
"The effect of the presentation style also colored students' reactions to
factors unrelated to the teaching, such as the quality of the textbook and
teaching aids used," she added. Yet the textbook and teaching aids were
the same both semesters.
Williams' and Ceci's study are published in the September issue of Change,
a journal for administrators in higher education.
"Given the omnipresent power of course evaluations in academia today, one
might think that their accuracy and appropriateness have been extensively
studied," Williams and Ceci write. "The sad truth is that we still know
very little as yet about how students arrive at their judgments about
teaching effectiveness. Based on the present data, we know that it is at
least possible for student ratings to be extremely systematic and reliable,
yet invalid!"
Williams and Ceci decided to undertake the study after Ceci took a teaching
skills workshop at Cornell during the intersession between the fall and
spring semesters. That spring semester, Ceci taught the identical course
but with one teaching skill he had learned in the workshop: He used an
"enthusiastic style" of teaching by employing more pitch variability and
more gestures.
Using three different validity checks to ensure the students took the
evaluations seriously and that the composition of the class was the same,
Williams and Ceci made the deliberate effort to ensure that there was a
reliable difference in Ceci's demeanor between the two semesters while
keeping the material and content of the lectures, textbooks, exams and
teaching aids virtually identical.
"With some coaching, teaching in a more enthusiastic style is a fairly easy
change to effect. Yet the improvement in ratings due to this simple change
can make the difference between being awarded tenure and not being awarded
tenure and other important career milestones," Williams said.
Williams and Ceci advocate for more opportunities for teaching faculty to
train in techniques that can enhance their students' ratings, especially if
these ratings are used by administrators to make important career
decisions. They also call for more research to ensure better and fairer
means of evaluating teaching effectiveness.
As former Mayor Ed Koch of New York City used to ask, "How'm I doing?"
Williams and Ceci suggest that instructors would be well advised to ask
their students the same. "As in politics, the answer may have more to do
with style than substance," they conclude.
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