INCREASING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COURSE EVALUATION IN LARGE-ENROLLMENT GEOSCIENCE CLASSES

Teaching effectiveness at the university level has traditionally been assessed through two methods: peer review by senior faculty and course evaluations by students. While neither method is ideal, the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has taken steps to increase the relevance of teaching evaluations in large-enrollment undergraduate classes.

If a standard evaluation form is to be given to all students in all classes the questions should be unbiased against large sections. For example, the standard form used by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte asks students if their instructor “relates to [them] as an individual”. Clearly it is unfair to evaluate a professor teaching a class of 200 using the same metric as one teaching a class of ten. In the last four years, the ratings by students in smaller Earth Science classes were 12% higher than those in classes with 80 or more students.

Instructors should be compared with others teaching comparable classes with similar enrollment. Geoscience instructors should be evaluated against both mean departmental and university-wide results. Some general education courses are more popular with students and evaluations tend to be higher in these courses. When student evaluations from large geography and geology courses are compared, the geography courses scored 10% higher (n=194 sections).

Finally, student evaluations must be put into the context of the difficulty of the professor. In UNCC’s Department of Geography and Earth Science, instructor evaluations are plotted against the mean grade-point average assigned by the professor. The resulting scatterplot divides the instructors into four quartiles: those that assign high grades and receive high evaluations, those that assign low grades and receive high evaluations, those that assign high grades and receive poor evaluations, and those that assign low grades and receive poor evaluations. Two plots are constructed for each semester: one for small undergraduate and graduate sections and one for large introductory sections. These plots are considered by the tenure and review committee and give the instructor a sense of how difficult he or she is relative to other instructors and how effective his or her teaching methods are.