The University of Kansas has adopted a new form for evaluating teachers in hopes of giving meaning to students’ opinion of instructors.

This is the first time the form, called the Curriculum & Instruction Survey, has been changed in more than 20 years.

Dan Bernstein, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and chair of the task force that created the new evaluation form, said the old form used the answers to the question, “What do you think of this instructor?” as the basis for judging instructors’ performances. He said the University decided to remove that question because faculty thought it was unfair.

“Some faculty members would ignore that data because students were not the best people to address that question,” Bernstein said. “A key feature of the new questions is that it is the consensus of the task force that students are the right people to answer these questions. People will not dismiss these answers because students are the right people to be answering them.”

The University is not only changing the form students use to evaluate teachers, but its entire faculty evaluation policy. Bernstein said teachers wanted an evaluation that covered a broader range of teaching. He said the new policy would make the student voice more authentic and valued. He said the goal was to direct the amount of energy that was spent complaining about the system and instead do something about the system.

In July 2006, The Faculty Executive Committee, FacEx, created the Task Force on Assessment of Teaching and Learning to create a policy that adhered to the Board of Regents requirements for faculty evaluations and would be a more appropriate evaluation of teachers’ performances. Bernstein said the Board of Regents mandates that certain topics be addressed in the evaluation, such as setting and reaching goals, but that the Regents are very open about how they addressed. The University’s evaluation policy had not been changed since 1996.

Departments will not be mandatated to use this new, default form, however, the Office of the Provost will pay for the production cost of the forms if departments use the provost-sponsored form. If a department chooses to use its own form, it will have to use money from its budget to pay for the forms.

Bernstein said the task force based the new teacher evaluation form on the form Student Senate has online.

“It was getting at features of teaching that students are really good at observing, and the community needs to hear about that,” Bernstein said.

During the spring and summer, the task force tested various versions of the new evaluation form on 1,200 students. Bernstein said the University removed all the overall and summary questions, the question that asked if the teacher knew the subject, whether the course involved too much work and added a question asking whether the student was treated with respect.

Bernstein said the task force thought it was not appropriate for students to comment on whether a class was too much work because students misunderstood the question. He said the course number of a class should reflect how much students should know about the subject before taking the class, not the amount of reading and work that was assigned. He said the amount of work should be the same in all classes.

The task force also decided to add a separate sheet of paper to the evaluation form for comments. Bernstein said the inclusion of comments in the evaluation packets has always been optional. However, the comments were collected on the same piece of paper as the ratings, rendering their inclusion non-optional. He also said if teachers report comments, they must turn in all the comments they received.

“We worked with KU research faculty who study the analysis of comments and they described a set of guidelines to assure even minimal validity from using comments,” Bernstein said. “We feel those must be followed if comments become part of the evaluation. It’s a long document, but basically it requires a more formal analysis than is usually done.”

Rick Levy, president of faculty senate and professor of law, said the law school uses a much different evaluation form than the new default form. He said he would prefer to use the new form because the comment section better analyzes teachers’ performances.

“When students write comments, sometimes those comments are really nasty and its easy to take those comments out of context and make a case against and for a faculty member based on selective comments,” Levy said. “If you are really going to do a good job you have to look at all the comments and evaluate them.”

The new evaluation policy will also allow classes in the same department of similar course numbers to be compared with each other and not to classes of higher levels and different subjects. Bernstein said in the past, faculty who taught large introductory courses were compared with teachers who taught small graduate seminars, which are incomparable.

“The goal was to expand the evaluation of teaching to include how much students learn, the contributions that teachers make outside of class and the way teachers use both feedback from students and student learning to change their teaching over time,” Bernstein said.

Members of Faculty and University Senate expressed concern that the new evaluation did not take tenure into consideration. The senators said they were interested to see if a professor’s tenure affects his or her performance.

Robert Harrington, a professor in the department of research and education, told the senators work in the department of education was being done on that subject. Bernstein said it was a bigger question than the task force could address.

“It’s an important question, but we didn’t set out to sort out how to include lifespan development in a world with tenure,” Bernstein said. “A task force in the future could look into that.”

Stephanie Beltran, Leawood junior, said she liked the new form better than the old form, because its layout was less confusing, but that she did not really notice a change in most questions. She also said some of the new questions were pointless.

“‘Was the course at a convenient time?’ It doesn’t matter if you have to take it anyway,” Beltran said.

She also said she did not like the separation of the numerical and comment sections.

“I’m not the type of person who gives bad remarks about people, but if they are going to keep it there’s no point because no one else is going to see it,” Beltran said. “I could just tell them in person.”

—Edited by Sasha Roe