From EdSurge Higher Education – 10-20-2023
The way most colleges evaluate teaching — by using anonymous student evaluations — is "probably going to be illegal" in coming years.
That’s the view of Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. That’s because he says data shows the system is "very biased against, for example, if you’re a underrepresented minority or a female instructor in a white-dominated field, you just get lower evaluations even if you do this exactly the same as a white male does."
Since winning the Nobel Prize in 2001, Wieman has shifted his research focus to studying how to improve teaching, essentially dropping the work in atomic physics that won him the top prize in his discipline.
And one of his latest projects is encouraging new ways to evaluate college teaching. Partly with money from a $4 million Yidan Prize he won for his teaching research, he is supporting an effort by the Association of American Universities that provided grants to a handful of colleges to come up with demonstration projects of better evaluation systems.
“People always say you can’t tell [faculty] what to do,” he tells EdSurge. “I’m convinced they really are doing what they get rewarded for. And right now the teaching evaluations are so meaningless. They really are counted appropriately, counted very little, in the incentive and reward promotion system. So what you need is something that’s a good, meaningful evaluation, that then could be taken seriously in how you hire and promote people, and then it’ll make a big difference.”
That’s just part of what we learned when we sat down with Wieman for a wide-ranging interview for this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast. Be sure to read highlights of the interview, or listen to the whole conversation, to learn what he’s learned about teaching and how he hopes to change how science is taught.
Operations and Supply Chain Management 