Through its program of Teaching Questionnaires (TQ), E&E helps UM instructors, departments, and schools to design custom questionnaires for use in evaluating teaching. Before the fall term of 2008, E&E each year printed nearly 500,000 TQ forms for teachers in more than 16,000 classes. In fall of 2008, the TQ program became a paperless operation for courses on the Ann Arbor campus. Students now fill out electronic forms on the Web.
Although research studies support the validity of student ratings as a measure of teaching effectiveness, teachers who want to improve their teaching sometimes find rating systems lacking. They point to such problems as the following:
- Irrelevant Questions. The questions included on many institutional questionnaires are supposed to fit all courses, but irrelevant questions (e.g., questions about the laboratory in non-laboratory courses, about use of the chalkboard in non-lecture classes) are common. One-size-fits-all questionnaires fail to address the specific concerns of individual teachers.
- Unclear Questionnaires. Many questionnaires give students too little information about how teachers, departments, and colleges use questionnaire results. Students may not realize that the questionnaires are an important means of communicating about teaching.
- Unclear Reports. To interpret rating results, teachers need to know about ratings received in classes similar to theirs. Reports in some rating systems contain little or no comparative data.
- No Consulting Help. Even if teachers are able to interpret their ratings, they may not know what to do to improve. Most teachers need some guidance if they are to develop more effective teaching strategies.
The TQ system was designed to solve these problems.
Interpret Results
How Teaching Evaluation Medians Are Calculated
Among the services provided by the TQ program are the following:
- Questionnaire Design. Instructors and departments design TQ forms by selecting relevant items from a large catalog of course evaluation questions. A downloadable copy of this item catalog is available online in Adobe Acrobat format. TQ forms can contain up to 30 rating questions and up to 5 open-ended comment questions.
- Data collection. Students typically complete evaluations during the last week of classes. At the beginning of the week, students receive emails directing them to My Workspace pages in CTools, where they find their course evaluation forms. Students who do not complete evaluations promptly receive reminder reminder emails until they fill them out, or until the evaluation period ends.
- Reporting. Instructors are able to view evaluation results in their Faculty Center websites on Wolverine Access. The results are presented in two reports: a summary report that tabulates all quantitative ratings on a single page, and a detailed report that displays individual student comments and associated ratings in multi-page format.
- Interpretation. E&E also provides a guide for instructors to use in interpreting results.
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