Thirty years ago, the physicist and teacher Banesh Hoffmann wrote a book, ''The Tyranny of Testing,'' which was attacked by the test-making industry and ignored by educationists. It showed how multiple-choice questions, by their form and substance, work against the aim of teaching.

In this model, it is also necessary to create a cultural context in which students themselves see the value in such experimentation and are not penalized for it.

throughout an individual's schooling, the activity of readinglacks a coherent or explicit relationship to work that is assessed,unlike writing (Du Boulay 1999; Saltmarsh & Saltmarsh, 2008)

Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall found students evaluated textbooks based on how "smart" the side margin notes seemed before purchasing. In an effort to discover methods for using annotations in eBooks, Marshall stumbled upon this physical-world behavior, an approach to gaining a wisdom-of-crowds conclusion tucked away in the margins [3].

In addition, students presented several scenarios in which they could imagine reporting that a teacher was highly effective even if they personally did not feel they learned very much—for instance, if they were not sufficiently prepared for a class or too tired to pay close attention.

Understanding the failure of internal knowledge markets: A framework for diagnosis and improvement

“We assume that they feed everything to a giant fiery furnace.”

We just cannot know all that life will throw at us, and if we want our grading contract to be fair and equitable for everyone, we need to reexamine it, reflect on how it has been working for each of us, and perhaps adjust it. 

Student evaluations of teachers are notoriously biased against women, with women routinely receiving lower scores than their male counterparts.

Short-term (i.e., “This year, I will see...”) and long-term (i.e., “In 10 years, I will see...) indicators are needed.

These guidelines offer a lens that is distinct to our field and represent emergent directions in our work that are important to capture, particularly larger-scale change initiatives in alignment with college and university priorities.

These guidelines define evaluation as information used for local decision making, which can also make a CTL’s work visible on campus.

how to maximize that stack of evaluations.

Teaching Eval Shake-Up

Eighty-five percent of provosts report that their institutions use student evaluations when judging faculty members for tenure, promotion or raises.

Evaluating Online Courses

I often use a supplemental evaluation form at the end of the term. There are two competing functions of the evaluation. The first is to give you feedback for course improvement, and the second is to assess performance. What the students might think is constructive feedback might be seen as a negative critique by those not in the classroom. It’s in our interest to separate those two functions onto separate pieces of paper. Before we went digital, I used to hold up the university form and say: “This form [holding up the scantron] is being used by the school as a referendum on my continued employment. I won’t be able to access these forms until after the next semester already starts, so they won’t help me out that much.” Then I held up another piece of paper [an evaluation I wrote with specific questions about the course] and said, “This one is constructive feedback about what you liked and didn’t like about the course. If you have criticisms of the course that you want me to see, but don’t think that my bosses need to see them, then this is the place to do it. Note that this form has specific questions about our readings, homework, tests and lessons. I’m just collecting these for myself, and I’d prefer if you don’t put your names on them.” I find that students are far more likely to evaluate my teaching in broad strokes in the university form when I use this approach, and there are fewer little nitpicky negative comments.