Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Evaluating the evaluations

Busy morning so I don't have time to do more than provide some links and the abstract for this paper on the effectiveness of college teachers.
In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality are often based on contemporaneous student performance on standard-ized achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching quality. We possess unique data that allow us to measure relative student performance in mandatory follow-on classes. We compare metrics that capture these three different notions of instructional quality and present evidence that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow-on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.
Here's the ungated version via Tyler Cowen. May not be quite the same as the published one.

Here's Andrew Gelman's reaction.

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