By Kai Alpin-Godsey
This year, in the final weeks of classes, students can expect to fill out a new, updated Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) form — one that seeks to mitigate implicit bias in student evaluations and to garner more specific, actionable feedback.
This is the result of a five-year faculty-led process that involved consulting higher education assessment research conducted at LC and other institutions, analyzing published studies, sending out surveys and pilot testing.
In spring of 2024, eight faculty members volunteered to use version one of the updated SET as their regular end-of-semester course evaluation. 208 students across 15 courses responded to the new form, and their feedback was analyzed to adjust and create a revised version of the SET.
Faculty committees used the feedback from version one to create version two, which was then tested by 18 faculty members and 618 students this past fall.
Associate Dean of Faculty Studies and Professor of Rhetoric & Media Studies Daena Goldsmith worked alongside Associate Professor of Psychology Todd Watson to create version three, which will be used in the majority of student evaluations at the end of this semester.
In an email interview on April 2, Goldsmith explained how student and faculty feedback helped illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of version two.
“Their feedback was mostly positive,” she wrote. “The most common concern expressed was about the length of time it took (on average, 23-25 minutes) but many said it was worth it to give and receive more specific feedback. We also received suggestions about further refining and clarifying questions.”
Goldsmith described the relevance of student teaching evaluations to faculty assessments.
“Student teaching evaluations are one part of a faculty member’s teaching file,” she wrote. “That file also includes other materials such as copies of syllabi, assignments, and exams and faculty can choose to add evaluations of teaching by peers, alumni, or students. Importantly, faculty also provide a teaching philosophy statement, which includes their reflections on their teaching evaluations, descriptions of new strategies they have implemented and professional development workshops or opportunities they’ve attended, and plans for continuing to develop their teaching. We use all of these sources of information to assess a faculty member’s teaching.”
Goldsmith explained that the changes this semester reflect a larger effort to create a more holistic method of evaluating faculty.
“The changes in the forms are part of a broader multi-year examination of how we assess teaching for formative (helping faculty improve) and summative (evaluation for personnel decisions) purposes,” she wrote.
The first of two major concerns driving the revision of SET forms had to do with reducing implicit bias in student evaluations of their professors.
“The questions in the new form focus on specific features of teaching and learning rather than ‘overall course’ or ‘overall instructor,’” Goldsmith said. “The order and structure of questions is also designed to prompt critical thinking rather than ‘peripheral processing’ that might be based on gut feelings, your mood on a particular day, or whether you had donuts in class. Global questions and peripheral processing are two ways that implicit bias can creep into evaluations. It opens up the possibility that our responses are coming from stereotypes we’ve internalized that we aren’t even aware we have rather than from stopping to think about specific features of a class that have to do with learning.”
The second concern had to do with making the information more useful to professors, to encourage formative professional development.
“The second motivation for changing the forms was a desire to get feedback that’s more specific, interpretable, and actionable. The new form encourages students to explain or give examples for each numerical rating, so that faculty know why they received that rating,” Goldsmith wrote. “With the old form, even when the numbers were great or students gave glowing comments, it wasn’t always clear what you were doing right. And if students were unhappy or the responses were mixed, it could be frustrating not to have a clear idea of what to do about it. The most positive responses to this new format for evaluations were from students who said it prompted them to give more specific feedback and from faculty who felt they got a clearer understanding of students’ experiences.”
According to Goldsmith, there are three notable changes to this year’s forms, as opposed to faculty evaluation forms from years prior.
“First, the forms begin with open-ended questions that ask what the instructor did to support learning, what they could have done to better support learning, and what the student did that supported learning or could be changed,” she said. “Second, there are fewer rating questions and they use a scale that ranges from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” (with a “not applicable” option). Third, after each rating question, students are asked to explain or give examples.”
Goldsmith explained that most, but not all students will use version three at the end of this semester.
“Because faculty have not yet voted to approve the new form, they had the option to continue to use the old form in SP25 but a large majority of faculty will be using the new form, so this is likely what most students will see in the end-of-semester evaluations this spring,” Goldsmith wrote.
Goldsmith also emphasized the importance and value of taking time to fill the form out in its entirety.
“The new form does take a bit longer to complete, and it does ask students to write more, but many of the faculty and students who have used the new form felt it was worth it to mitigate bias and provide better feedback,” she said. “We were really pleased to see that the majority of students who’ve used the new form did take the time to write comments.”
Pauls Toutonghi, professor of English specializing in creative fiction and nonfiction writing, exhibited concern that student evaluations of professors can hinder freedom of expression for educators.
“Student evaluations of professors are destroying higher education,” he wrote in an email statement to The Mossy Log. “Because professors live in fear of offending students, they are not free to teach the way that they want to. Why does this matter? If we had an envelope of freedom around teaching — we would then, in turn, have an envelope of freedom around learning. But we have neither. And it’s awful. What we have now is an Orwellian system of control, where no one in the classroom feels free to speak their mind.”
Toutonghi expressed little to no hope that adjusting the forms would benefit faculty or students.
“Nothing short of eliminating student evaluation will restore professors’ freedom of speech in the classroom. Changing the evaluation is putting lipstick on a pig,” he wrote.
On the other hand, Todd Watson, associate professor of psychology, who worked alongside other faculty members to advocate for these changes, believes that the student evaluations are beneficial to both students and faculty.
“I think the new forms offer several important benefits to the community,” Watson said. “First, they’re designed to help reduce the potential impact of implicit biases on teaching evaluations. Second, I (and the strong majority of faculty who helped pilot these) feel the new forms are better at guiding students to think and respond critically to give clear, specific, actionable feedback that will help us grow as educators. Finally, the new forms give students a chance to reflect on how their own strategies and choices (not just their professor’s) supported their learning and success in the course.”
He re-emphasized that even though the forms will take longer to fill out, he believes that they will greatly improve the quality of the feedback for educators.
“In terms of drawbacks — beyond us all getting used to something a bit different during a stressful time of the semester — the new forms will likely take longer to fill out,” Watson said. “In my classes, they took about 25 minutes, whereas the ‘old’ ones usually took 15-20. Again though, overall, I think the quality of the feedback we’ll get will be worth it.”
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