Advanced Principles of Economics

Michael O'Hare: Malpractice with chalk on our sleeves: Noted

Michael O'Hare: Malpractice with chalk on our sleeves:

My colleague Philip Stark, in our statistics department, is on the job…. Student evaluations of teaching (SET’s) have many important advantages as a quality assurance mechanism.  First, they are extremely cheap…. Second, they  completely protect faculty from engaging with each other about pedagogy…. Third, it has never been shown conclusively that outsourcing teaching quality assurance in this way has damaged any core values, neither research productivity nor the record of the football team.  Nor parking, I guess….

Do good SET’s indicate more learning by students? On the Berkeley Teaching Blog, along with the director of our Teaching and Learning Center, Richard Freishtat, Philip has posted the first and the second of three analyses of what we know about this, and his findings are devastating… to the claim that we are managing the resources society has given us in the way we say we are, for excellence in research and teaching. (If you are a student at Cal, or a taxpayer in California, you should be in the streets with pitchforks and torches.  If you are our new chancellor (or our new president),  fixing this should be your Job One….

Philip B. Stark & Richard Freishtat: What Evaluations Measure: Part II: Noted

Philip B. Stark & Richard Freishtat: What Evaluations Measure: Part II:

• Student teaching evaluation scores are highly correlated with students’ grade expectations
• Effectiveness scores and enjoyment scores are related
• Students’ ratings of instructors can be predicted from the students’ reaction to 30 seconds of silent video of the instructor: first impressions may dictate end-of-course evaluation scores, and physical attractiveness matters
• The genders and ethnicities of the instructor and student matter, as does the age of the instructor….
• Controlled, randomized experiments are the gold standard…. The only controlled randomized experiments on student teaching evaluations have found that student evaluations of teaching effectiveness are negatively associated with direct measures of effectiveness….
• The survey questions apparently most influenced by extraneous factors are exactly of the form we ask on campus: overall teaching effectiveness….

It’s time for Berkeley to revisit the wisdom of asking students to rate the overall teaching effectiveness of instructors, of considering those ratings to be a measure of actual teaching effectiveness, of reporting the ratings numerically and computing and comparing averages, and of relying on those averages for high-stakes decisions such as merit cases and promotions.

In the third installment of this blog, we discuss a pilot conducted in the Department of Statistics in 2012–2013 to augment student teaching evaluations with other sources of information. The additional sources still do not measure effectiveness directly, but they complement student teaching evaluations and provide formative feedback and touchstones.  We believe that the combination paints a more complete picture of teaching and will promote better teaching in the long run.

MIchael O'Hare: Peer Evaluation of Class Participation: Noted

Michael O'Haere: Peer Evaluation of Class Participation:

I… take as given that the correct criterion for this part of a grade is student’s contribution to the learning of others.  The problem this criterion presents is that it cannot be observed outside the heads of those doing the learning…. On the principle that I have the right to demand information (like answers on exams) that I need to make a fair performance evaluation, I demand information about their learning from others…. As Lauren Resnick pithily observed, “in school, collaboration is cheating; in the workplace, it’s essential”.  When I write letters of recommendation, I often have occasion to include the following text, and I think it has a good effect:

Student X took my course Y in semester Z [paper, projects, yada yada]…. In this course, class participation counts for 00% of the grade [varies from 25% to 40%] and is assessed by the other students in a confidential survey. Wallflowers, unprepared students, and air hogs tend to do poorly on this element. X received a CP grade [of  G/in the top 00% of the class], and I consider this an indicator of real leadership potential.

Econ 2: Spring 2014: Course Intro Notes