FINDING A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF STUDENT EVALUATIONS: AN INDEX OF TRADITIONAL EVALUATION QUESTIONS

Abstract

Literature commonly finds student evaluations of economics instruction do not assess True teaching effectiveness.  Many techniques improving learning outcomes result in lower student evaluations because students must work harder.  Still, we often rely on a single overall rating for assessing teacher quality.  We construct a model of student responses that indicate likeability of the instructor and difficulty of the instruction. We test the predictive power of these indicators using teaching evaluations of intermediate microeconomics instructors over five years alongside data on student grades in future courses that depend on intermediate microeconomics. Using these questions to construct a more meaningful evaluation of how well the intermediate microeconomic instructors prepare students to recall and use important concepts in the future improves our ability to evaluate instructor effectiveness.