Announcement of Dissertation Proposal Defense by Travis Degheri

Announcement of Dissertation Proposal Defense by Travis Degheri

Date and Time

Thursday, February 11, 2016

This event occurred in the past

  • Thursday, February 11, 2016 from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Location

Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, 133

5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110

Cost

Free*

Sponsor(s)

Details

STUDENT EVALUATIONS:  UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF COURSE AND INSTRUCTOR CHARACTERISTICS

Abstract

Student evaluations of college instructors are anything but a new phenomenon, having been used since the early 1900s. Today, universities around the world continue to use student evaluations as a means for measuring instructor effectiveness. Despite concerns of student objectivity, at many institutions these evaluations have an oversized influence on decisions involving faculty promotion, tenure, and merit salary increases. While there is much literature examining student evaluations, few studies have provided a longitudinal, multi-discipline exploration of the impact course and faculty characteristics have on student evaluations.

In an effort to fill this gap in the literature, this study will examine the extent to which faculty and course characteristics explain variation in the scores produced through the student evaluation process at a public university in the southeastern United States. Specifically, this study will use both descriptive and inferential statistics to examine the importance of faculty characteristics of gender, tenure status, and the number of years a faculty member has been at the university, together with characteristics of the course that include, but are not limited to: time of day the course was offered, method of course delivery, number of times that the course meets per week, course level, and the department where the course was offered. Two databases will be used in creating the dataset for this study; one of these, Student Perceptions of Teaching houses student evaluations, while the other contains course-related data. Since both databases contain information critical to the analysis, this study will concentrate on six total semesters where these two databases overlap, Summer 2012 to Spring 2014. These semesters are equally distributed and include two summer semesters, two fall semesters and two spring semesters. They were chosen because they represented the most recent semesters available at the time of the study.

Given the important role that student evaluations play in the decision-making process underlying faculty promotion, tenure, and merit salary increases, the findings in this study will help both faculty and administrators better understand the course and instructor characteristics that may be impacting student evaluations, in effect creating a more equitable and efficient process for reviewing faculty.