K-12 2.0
The website RateMyProfessors.com has been the subject of much criticism as it has grown in popularity. For instance, a professor from Central Michigan University ran some numbers and found that “the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher.”
Inside Higher Ed reports today, however, on a couple studies that have found high correlations between RateMyProfessors.com and official university student-evaluation systems:
A new study is about to appear in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education and it will argue that there are similarities in the rankings in RateMyProfessors.com and IDEA, a student evaluation system used at about 275 colleges nationally and run by a nonprofit group affiliated with Kansas State University.
What is notable is that while RateMyProfessors.com gives power to students, IDEA gives a lot of control over the process to faculty members. Professors identify the teaching objectives that are important to the class, and those are the measures that count the most. In addition, weighting is used so that adjustments are made for factors beyond professors’ control, such as class size, student work habits and so forth—all variables that RateMyProfessors doesn’t really account for (or try to account for).
And at least some professors, it seems, find the reviews on RateMyProfessors.com useful for evaluating their own teaching strategies:
“I’ve been an instructor for 10 years. I look at it,” he said, adding that he has found insights “that weren’t on my teaching evaluations and I have thought: ‘Wow. I believe what the student has said is valid and perhaps I can change the way I teach.”
The obvious question here is, Could this work in K-12 education? There have been various efforts already to harness the power of Web 2.0 to improve K-12 schooling—see GreatSchools.net, for instance. But none have really reached the critical mass necessary for a collaborative online source of information to be of much use to people.
There’s also the question of whether 13-year-olds’ opinions of their teachers would be as reliable as those of college students. Surely, as in the case of RateMyProfessors.com, there would be plenty of mean-spirited comments. But done right it could be a powerful tool for gauging teacher and school quality.
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April 25th, 2008 at 10:02 am
There is nothing I trust thirteen year olds to evaluate, perhaps especially their teachers. But evaluations of K-12 teachers by PARENTS (as one element of the teacher evaluation system), that I think has potential.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I teach K-12 — specifically those 13-year-olds Checker refers to. I’ve looked up my ratings. One of them says I don’t have great social skills but it doesn’t matter because I’m smart. *lol* Got it in one, kid. (Well, it *does* matter. But it’s the story of my life.)
13-year-olds have an odd set of biases, but I believe it’s important to consider their perspectives in evaluations, because they’re the only ones who are there watching all the time. I’m very skeptical of parents...I do think they should be included as parents are one of the constituencies teachers play to, but if you don’t trust 13-year-olds to evaluate, why are you trusting their parents (when most of their evidence comes from the reports of those very 13-year-olds)? Parents’ objectives are, all too often, not in line with what’s best for their kids (of whose talents, behavior, and needs the parents may be astonishingly unaware) or with the curriculum standards (I teach a foreign language and many parents don’t know what the curriculum even ought to be like, or understand what their kids are doing).
There are some things that parents are good for evaluating — do their kids enjoy the class? Do their kids do a reasonable amount of homework for the class (whatever your community standards of “reasonable” are)? Do they talk about the material, particularly when not required to, and seem interested? Does the teacher do a good job communicating with home? But there are a lot of things that parents are not good at evaluating, because their data set is so limited and skewed, and some things they’re actively awful at evaluating. While I think that the ideal teacher evaluation system involves feedback from parents, I would be very skeptical of most attempts to include it.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I agree that there is a benefit to evaluation of a person’s performance as a teacher. Students, parents, and administrators have the right to have their say, within the boundaries of the job being done. I do take issue, however, with this being carried out in a public forum. Too often we are allowed to state our opinions anonymously, while there is no such protection for the person being evaluated.