Student Ratings of Instructors: From Scores to Administrative Decisions

Abstract

The abundant literature on student rating scales of instruction has focused mainly on issues of scale development, reliability, and validity [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The consensus appears to be that the scales usually have sufficient reliability and validity to use them as one indicator of teaching effectiveness. Thus, they have been frequently used by individual instructors to get feedback at the end of a course regarding their teaching effectiveness. Centra [1] has examined the influence of such data on a sample of faculty and concluded that not much change took place among those most severely criticized. We do not know of any study examining this question of influence when the data were (a) required and (b) used in promotion/tenure It is known that student rating scales are increasingly a part of promotion dossiers [7, 10] even though there is no consensus on just how to utilize the data in such decisions [8]. An earlier study [6] on the practices of using student rating scale data when evaluating faculty for salary, tenure, and promotion decisions led to the present paper. In 1973 the Board of the Oregon State System of Higher Education revised its policy pertaining to faculty evaluations, henceforth requiring appropriate student input into the evidence accumulated as the basis for reappointment, promotion, and tenure decisions. For the instruction function, the use of student ratings became an