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EDUCATION
Many institutions want to improve undergraduate teaching but don't know how to assess it or provide motivation for improvements. The National Research Council has gathered the answers in a report, "Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics" (http://national-academies.org). Stuffed with advice and references, the report discusses the roles of administrators, faculty, and students in improving student learning and enhancing faculty teaching skills.
That may be overly optimistic, but the report does offer other more practical guidance. One topic covered extensively is teaching evaluation by students and peers. Many evaluation techniques don't give enough weight to how much students have learned. "Instead," the report says, "the measure of a teacher's effort often is reduced to the number of courses he or she teaches, the number of students taught, or grade distributions. These are not measures of outcomes and results." More informative evaluations can be built up from feedback from peers, teaching assistants, and student consultants who have attended a faculty member's lectures and filled out forms like the examples provided in the report; students' ability to paraphrase a lecture's key points; and the relative tendency of the faculty member's students to major in the professor's field. And ideas for improvements can be gleaned from college teaching centers, professional societies, and techniques as simple as videotaping a professor's lecture. |
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