The impact of grade inflation on teachers’ evaluation: A quantitative study conducted in the context of five Lebanese universities

Asking students to evaluate teaching faculty by every ending semester in modern education is an established trend. In the higher education circles, it is validated based on a large body of research showing a relationship between these evaluations and students’ achievement. The arising problem is whether this relation is positively associated or not, and the presence of a growing debate pertaining to the many factors influencing this correlation. Most of the cited research shows a link between the attitude of students and their achievement. This research studies the effect of students’ grade point average (GPA), together with the type of university as public or private, and students’ major, on their attitude towards faculty teaching evaluations. The results of the multiple regression show a strong relationship between GPA and students’ attitude towards faculty evaluations, suggesting an ethical duality affecting grade inflation.

A Brief Review of Our Agile Teaching Formats in Entrepreneurship Education

Companies are confronted with increasingly demanding environments, including globalization, technologization, intergenerationality, and crises such as the coronavirus pandemic. To accept uncertainties as a challenge and to recognize opportunities for development, well-educated and resilient founders are needed who can foster innovation and sustainable development within society and the economy. The majority of today’s entrepreneurs have an academic background. Hence, institutions for higher education need to provide comprehensive educational offerings and support initiatives to train and sensitize future entrepreneurs. Therefore, since 2013, agile teaching formats have been developed in our project at a Bavarian university of applied sciences. In two stages, we founded a limited company for hands-on experimentation with entrepreneurship and also conceptualized an elective course and an annual founders’ night. Based on a theoretical model and continuous teaching evaluations, we adjusted the individual modules to suit the target group. The objective is to promote the acquisition of key competencies and exert a positive influence on the startup quotient in the region. There are six startups by students who can be traced back to our project. This indicates that a target-group-oriented educational program encourages motivation and awareness of entrepreneurial thinking and action among students.

The pregnancy drop: How teaching evaluations penalize pregnant faculty

The “leaky pipeline” and the “maternal wall” have for decades described the loss of women in STEM and the barriers faced by working mothers. Of the studies examining the impact of motherhood or pregnancy on faculty in higher education, most focus on colleagues’ attitudes towards mothers; few studies explore pregnancy specifically, only a handful examine student evaluations in particular, and none include female faculty in engineering. This study is the first to compare student evaluations across fields from female faculty when they were pregnant against when they were not. Two scenarios were considered: (1) the lived experiences of faculty who taught classes while pregnant and while not pregnant and (2) an experiment in which students submitted teaching evaluations for an actress whom half the students believed was pregnant while the other half did not. Among faculty respondents, women of colour received lower scores while pregnant and these scores lowered further when women were in engineering and/or had severe symptoms. Depending on their demographics, students who participated in the experiment were awarded teaching evaluation scores that differed when they believed the instructor was pregnant. Findings suggest that in fields with fewer women, the maternal wall is amplified and there is a unique intersectional experience of it during pregnancy. These findings may be useful for Tenure and Promotion committees to understand and therefore account for pregnancy bias in teaching evaluations.

Contradicting findings of gender bias in teaching evaluations: Evidence from two experiments in Denmark

The role of gender in the interaction between citizens and public sector employees attracts increasing attention. Notably, gender effects have been described in performance evaluations across different contexts. With respect to student evaluations of teaching, a series of observational studies as well as experimental studies have found that women are evaluated lower than men. In this paper, we conduct two experiments in Denmark to test whether a similar gender bias is present in a national context that is generally considered among the most gender equal. Study 1 investigates differences in the evaluation of two similar presentations by teachers reported to be either male or female. Study 2 focuses on the evaluation of teaching material prepared by men and women respectively. The two studies arrive at similar conclusions: There is no gender bias in favor of men in the evaluations made by students. The paper discusses the implications of these findings.

Pengaruh atribut usia dan jenis kelamin dosen terhadap pemberian evaluasi oleh mahasiswa

The practice of giving evaluations from students to lecturers is often the moment when the halo effect occurs. Sex and age as individual attributes contribute to positive or negative evaluations of teaching evaluations. The purpose of this study is whether the attributes of age and sex interact with the halo effect in giving evaluations from students to lecturers. This research uses a one-shot case study with an online between-subjects design. One hundred twenty participants were divided into four groups. Each group evaluates 1 of 4 different photos (young men, older men, young women, and older women) labeled with the identity as a lecturer. The results of multiple linear regression analysis show: (1) The sex of the lecturer has no effect on student evaluation (F=0.730, p=0.395); (2) Lecturer age has no effect on student evaluation (F=0.587, p=0.445); (3) The interaction of sex and age has no effect on student evaluation (F=0.649, p=0.525). The sex and age of the lecturer do not affect the evaluation by students. The halo effect did not occur in the students in this study.

Can Women Teach Math (and Be Promoted)? A Meta-analysis of Gender Differences across Student Evaluations of Teaching

Academic women in economics have different experiences and outcomes than men and women in other social science fields do, including bias within their performance evaluation instruments, student teaching evaluations (STEs). Despite research citing biases in STEs, no study summarized the magnitude of these biases. A systematic review and meta-analysis addresses this by combining data from all prior research on the subject. Our meta-analysis examines gender bias in STEs, finding significant gender differences in economics favoring men but no evidence for gender differences in the remaining social sciences. Implications are discussed, and recommendations are made.

What really impacts the use of active learning in undergraduate STEM education? Results from a national survey of chemistry, mathematics, and physics instructors

Six common beliefs about the usage of active learning in introductory STEM courses are investigated using survey data from 3769 instructors. Three beliefs focus on contextual factors: class size, classroom setup, and teaching evaluations; three focus on individual factors: security of employment, research activity, and prior exposure. The analysis indicates that instructors in all situations can and do employ active learning in their courses. However, with the exception of security of employment, trends in the data are consistent with beliefs about the impact of these factors on usage of active learning. We discuss implications of these results for institutional and departmental policies to facilitate the use of active learning.

Comparison of Student Performance, Self-mutual and Tutor Teaching Assessments in PBL Tutorial Process Between 1st and 4th Year Dental Undergraduates

Objectives: Evaluate the effectiveness of PBL teaching and analyze potential influencing factors between senior and junior from the perspectives of student performance, student self-mutual and tutor teaching evaluations.Results: Study found the overall three comparative assessments scores of Grade 4 were significantly higher than those of Grade 1(P＜0.01). Further analysis revealed no significant difference of student performance score between Grade 4 and Grade 1 in the 1st unit (P＞0.05), but it was improved and maintained significantly since 2nd time (P＜0.01).Moreover, each self-mutual evaluation of 4th year students was significantly higher than that of 1st year students, especially in the second half of the course (P＜0.01).And, all the evaluations of tutor teaching from seniors were significantly higher than those from juniors (P＜0.01). Finally, no significant correlation between student self-mutual scores and those given by tutors no matter high or lower grade (P＞0.05).

Preservice teachers’ expressed awarenesses: emerging threads of retro-spection of learning and pro-spection of teaching

In this paper, we report an enquiry into elementary preservice teachers’ learning, as they engage in doing mathematics for themselves. As a group of researchers working in elementary Initial Teacher Education in English universities, we co-planned and taught sessions on growing pattern generalisation. Following the sessions, interviews of fifteen preservice teachers at two universities focused on their expressed awareness of their approach to the mathematical activity. Preservice teachers’ prospective planning and post-teaching evaluations of similar activities in their classrooms were also examined. We draw on aspects of enactivism and the notion of reflective “spection” in the context of teacher learning, tracing threads between preservice teachers’ retro-spection of learning and pro-spection of teaching. Our analysis indicates that increasing sensitivity to their own embodied processes of generalisation offers opportunities for novice teachers to respond deliberately, rather than to react impulsively, to different pedagogical possibilities. The paper contributes a new dimension to the discussion about the focus of novice elementary school teachers’ retrospective reflection by examining how deliberate retrospective analysis of doing mathematics, and not only of teaching actions, can develop awarenesses that underlie the growth of expertise in mathematics teaching. We argue that engaging preservice teachers in mathematics to support deliberate retrospective analysis of their mathematics learning and prospective consideration of the implications for teaching can enable more critical pedagogical choices.