A humorous take on student evaluations

Zachary Ernst has posted some funny suggestions for questions that might improve the typical student evaluation forms:

I occasionally complain about the uselessness of most quantitative measures of quality for complex activities like teaching or writing journal articles. But that's not to suggest that I'm against course evaluations. Far from it! In fact, I offer the following suggestions for new questions on the evaluations:

1. How much do you regret taking this course? 
2. If you overslept and missed class, would you consider that a good thing or a bad thing? 
3. If you had to choose clothing to represent how much you cared about this course, which of the following would you wear to class?

• Suit and tie
• Clean shirt
• Dirty shirt
• Sweatpants
• Pajamas

     4. Would you recommend this course to someone you don't like very

         much?

Better teaching = better grades?

The PEA Soup folks have had a lively discussion of how to adjust students' grades when we improve as teachers. Doug Portmore sets up the question:

Suppose that I’ve become a better teacher. Suppose, for instance, that I’ve used the same bank of test questions over the years and that, due to implementing certain non-substantive changes in my PHI X course, students taking that course from me this year are doing a better job answering those questions than students who took the same course from me in previous years. So the material that I’m trying to get the students to learn and the technique that I’ve been using for assessing whether they’ve learned it hasn’t change, but I’ve become more effective in that my current students are, on average, leaving the course with a better understanding of the material than students who took the same course from me in previous years. 

The question, then, is: Should I (A) adopt higher standards with respect to what level of understanding I expect from them so as to earn certain grades or (B) keep the same standards and give higher grades on average than I had been giving in previous years?

Ascending the Matterhorn during your office hours

I wanted to share an idea I implemented this term that seems positively received by my students. Starting in the sixth week of my Moral Philosophy course, we began to read Kant's Groundwork. As I remarked to the student, Kant's writings are the philosophical equivalent of the Matterhorn: steep, forbidding, Teutonic.

 

I hit upon the idea of scheduling some additional office hours during which I would work through the assigned readings with students. I reasoned that since I have to read in order to prepare my class meetings, it couldn't hurt to have students present so that we could read together.

Submit to Teaching Philosophy!

A reminder to those as yet unaware: Teaching Philosophy now has on online submission system, at teaching-philosophy.com. I know there's lot of great teaching-related scholarship out there for the world to discover, so please consider submitting to the journal.

The rational, non-expert student reader

Last week, I had a terrific teaching-related experience: At Becko's invitation, I gave a pair of teaching-related workshops at Lewis and Clark College. The first, for the faculty teaching in the college's first-year Exploration and Discovery program, addressed motivating students to read, improving their reading skills, and using assigned readings as platforms for in-class discussion and inquiry. The second discussed ways of gathering information about student learning so that we don't have to rely solely on numerical student evaluations for insight into how effective our teaching is.


A number of important themes were explored in the workshops, but I wanted to share some research and insights on two matters that seemed to strike a chord with the participants. They concern an old teaching bugaboo: student reading.

Teaching Philosophy, 35.2

The newest issue of Teaching Philosophy is out. There's a lot of great stuff, including articles on narrative pedagogy, metacognition, and student relativism, as well as the usual selection of book reviews.


Abstracts below the fold:

Relativism and Psychological Egoism

I've started revamping my Intro to Philosophy syllabus and have decided to tackle the inevitable discussion of relativism and psychological egoism early on by anticipating these objections with some readings.

I thought about using chapters from Snare's The Nature of Moral Thinking but a friend who used Snare in her class said that students found it difficult. I've tentatively settled on Rachels "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism," which appears in many anthologies, and perhaps also his "Humans are not Always Selfish". Someone recommended that I look at chapters from Shafer-Landau Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?

Any other recommendations or thoughts about the aforementioned possibilities?