Intimations of the 21st Century

Abstract

By happenstance rather than design, what began as a single study intended to refute the validity of student ratings of instruction turned into a 30-year quest into the nature of college teaching. Although I found that student ratings can be affected by seemingly extraneous variables such as instructor reputation, I quickly realized that the validity issue was not as simple as it first appeared, raising further questions such as: Was the student ratings questionnaire used in my study valid to begin with? Is instructor reputation simply a nuisance variable, even though it affects the validity of student ratings? Are students seduced by instructor reputation only under certain conditions? and so on. Oddly enough, a number of researchers, including myself, initially became interested in studying college teaching by attempting to demonstrate the invalidity of student ratings despite a research.