Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations

by Richard John Stapleton

Here is a pdf copy of my article “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations: A Study of Correlations Between Instructor Excellence, Study Production, Learning Production and Expected Grades.”

Published in 2001 by the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society in the Journal of Management Education, this article by Stapleton & Murkison has now been cited in 61 refereed professional journal articles, providing insights into how to evaluate teaching and learning in colleges and universities, showing how difficult it is to fairly evaluate teaching and why relative expected grades questions should always be included on student evaluation forms to provide a modicum of fairness.

To verify the 61 citations just punch Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations into Google and read the sources.

Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations gets to the heart of intractable problems of the teaching profession, if you want to call it that, the most serious of which is probably teacher evaluations. How can you or a teacher know how well a teacher is doing his/her job? What sort of criteria can you use for making this judgment? Certainly the purpose of teaching is to cause learning to occur in students, but how do you measure this? What kind of learning? How much learning? How much learning relative to what? What percentage of a prescribed content or syllabus a teacher causes students to memorize? Or how much learning a teacher produces in students relative to how much peer teachers produce? In other words are you attempting to measure absolute learning or relative learning?

Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations presents a unique Composite Indicator of Teaching Productivity (CITP), one of the most sophisticated metrics of teaching productivity yet developed in the teacher evaluation literature.

Check it out if interested at

http://www.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf

R J Stapleton
Effective Learning Company
Statesboro, Georgia
November 10, 2016
www.sagepub.com