Office of Evaluations and Exams - University of Michigan

Through its program of Teaching Questionnaires (TQ), E&E helps UM instructors, departments, and schools to design custom questionnaires for use in evaluating teaching. Last year E&E printed nearly 500,000 TQ forms for teachers in more than 16,000 classes. Starting in the fall of 2008, the TQ program will become a paperless system, and all TQ data will be collected for these classes via 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 finding 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.




		Through its program of Teaching Questionnaires (TQ), E&E helps UM instructors, departments, and schools to design custom questionnaires for use in evaluating teaching. Last year E&E printed nearly 500,000 TQ forms for teachers in more than 16,000 classes. Starting in the fall of 2008, the TQ program will become a paperless system, and all TQ data will be collected for these classes via 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 finding 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.
For Spring-Summer 2008:
	Design An Evaluation Interpret Results How Teaching Evaluation Medians Are Calculated
For Fall 2008:
	Online Evaluations Are Coming

			Among the services provided by the TQ program are the following: Questionnaire Design. Instructors usually design TQ forms by selecting relevant items from a large catalog of course evaluation questions. Instructors can select up to 30 of the catalog questions for a questionnaire. In some cases, instructors use standard TQ forms designed by committees within their departments. Data collection. In the TQ system now in use, E&E prints TQ forms for instructors. Starting in the fall of 2008, E&E will collect all TQ data online. Printed TQ forms will no longer be available for teachers on the Ann Arbor campus. Reporting. After students fill out TQ forms, E&E machine scans them and analyzes the data. When processing is complete, E&E returns a report, along with the original evaluation forms, to the instructor. Interpretation. E&E also provides a guide for instructors to use in interpreting results. TQ forms therefore fit actual courses and students, and teachers can view TQ results in context, with expert guidance if needed.

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