The Dreaded Teaching Evaluations (good news!)

Where I work we use the Student Ratings of Instruction (SRI) from IDEA. They are useful instruments meant to be used to modify and improve instruction, but of course we mainly use them (inappropriately) to evaluate instruction. I must admit that I've never found them too useful in terms of improvement, and often found the results to be annoying (the adjusted scores drive me nuts). But that may change now that I've heard a presentation by the president of IDEA, Ken Ryalls.

Dr. Ryalls (he's a former faculty, in fact a social psychologist like myself) explained that IDEA has always been about improving instruction, but that they are now trying to emphasize and enhance that function of the IDEA reports that faculty get about their classes.

Faculty get to indicate how important 12 different objectives are for their courses (from no importance, minor importance, to essential). The objectives range from gaining factual knowledge, to learning to apply course material, to developing a clearer understanding of, and commitment to, personal values. You can select them all to be essential or none, it's up to you. You then get a single score that indicates how well you did on the objectives you said were most important, and this number is said to be the most important in the whole report. I understood all of this pretty well. What Dr. Ryalls told me that I did NOT know was that IDEA has a set of papers that target each of the objectives (find them here). These papers are written by faculty with expertise in thes relevant areas, and are research-based. So, if you say that getting students to apply course content is important to you but your results indicate that you did not do so well on that objective, you can go to the website and learn about ways to improve in this area. That is pretty handy.

But IDEA doesn't stop there. They also have no less than 57(!) papers about a variety of pedagogical topics, like the flipped classroom, deep learning, team teaching, getting students to read, the list goes on! They also have teamed up with the POD network (Professional Organizational Development) to write papers about the other items on the SRI questionnaire. So if your students say that you don't show a personal interest in their learning, there's a paper about how to do that better. Perhaps you want to get your students to think creatively -- there's a paper on that.

In short, there's a lot more to the IDEA organization than those pesky teaching evaluations. Used correctly (as in, as IDEA means for them to be used), the IDEA reports can really help faculty target their efforts to improve instruction on the objectives they say are the most important. I've been doing it wrong all this time!