A New Approach to Course Evaluation

Abstract

One facet of recent campus unrest is the growing tendency of students to question and challenge traditional approaches to classroom teaching. This has taken several forms including student-sponsored course evaluation efforts. More than five thousand articles on the subject since i945 demonstrate the inability of professional educators to agree on a satisfactory description of the effective or ineffective college teacher, which suggests that direct feedback and evaluation from students may be the most promising avenue of research in the coming decade. This paper reports innovations in this area which were developed through an experimental communication-evaluation project conducted in i969 by the Bureau of Institutional Research at the University of Minnesota. Student course evaluation has traditionally had the following goals: (a) to evaluate instructors for promotion or other administrative decisions, (b) to help instructors improve their teaching, (c) to improve student morale and stimulate thought about course and educational objectives, and (d) to provide information through published evaluations to aid students in course