How Reliable are Students’ Evaluations of Teaching (SETs)? A Study to Test Student’s Reproducibility and Repeatability

Abstract

Students’ Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are widely used as measures of teaching quality in Higher Education. A review of specialized literature evidences that researchers widely discuss whether SETs can be considered reliable measures of teaching quality evaluation. Though the controversy mainly refers to the role of students as assessors of teaching quality, most of research studies on SETs focus on the design and validation of the evaluation procedure and even when the need of measuring SETs reliability is recognized, it is generally indirectly assessed for the whole group of students by measuring inter-student agreement. In this paper the focus is on the direct assessment of the reliability of each student as a measurement instrument of teaching quality. An agreement-based approach is here adopted in order to assess student’s ability to provide consistent and stable evaluations; the sampling uncertainty is accounted for by building non-parametric bootstrap confidence intervals for the adopted agreement coefficients.