Former Student Evaluation as a Criterion for Teaching Success

Abstract

A CONTINUING problem in education is that of I teacher evaluation. Despite a prodigious amount of research on teacher evaluation, little progress has been made, primarily because of the lack of agree ment on any universally acceptable criteria. For the most part, criteria used in the past (supervisor ratings, grades in education courses, student gain in knowledge, and student ratings) have been criti cized on valid grounds (1, 13, 14, 16). Mitzelsums up the situation by noting, More than a half cen tury of research effort has not yielded meaningful, measurable criteria around which the majority of the nation's educators can rally. No standards exist which are commonly agreed on as the c r i t e r i a of teacher effectiveness. (12: 1481) Although far from solving the problem, the pres ent writer has investigated another criterion which shows new promise: former student ratings. Even though some preliminary investigations of f o r m e r student ratings are found in the literature (3) m o st teacher evaluation researchers have assumed that once a student departs from the classroom either the teacher's influence has ceased or is too complex to measure in any meaningful manner. A. S. Barr (2), in the discussion of his studies at Wisconsin, does not mention using any criterion involving the student after leaving the classroom. On the con trary, the present writer suggests that in many areas the effects of teaching are all too apparent. Nearly every student experiences a school course emphasizing the necessity of informed voting, yet less than 60 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballot in a national election. On a purely individual basis, we can often recall a teacher who has been instrumental in changing our life in some important way. Such a person was re cently described by Michael, Com rey and Fruchter (11: 2):