Abstract

FITCHETT, Jennifer M.  and  SHERIDAN, Craig M.. Identifying and Correcting for Bias in Students' Evaluations of Teaching: The Use of Measurable Bench-marking Questions. JoGEA [online]. 2023, vol.6, pp.32-52. ISSN 2788-9114.  http://dx.doi.org/10.46622/jogea.v6i1.4280.

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are widely used to quantitatively assess the competence of university lecturers. SETs can be used formatively to direct lecturers in improving teaching and, more summatively, in determining the suitability of a candidate for employment, confirmation in post or tenure, promotion, and performance-based salary adjustment or reward. The validity and suitability of SETs remain heavily contested, yet few papers provide workable recommendations to identify evaluations completed in a biased manner, and to improve the validity of the tool or the interpretation. This perpetuates distrust for SETs, and, in cases, lecturers behaving to artificially enhance their scores. We present a method to assess the accuracy of SETs, either informally by the lecturer in understanding the outputs or formally by the administrative body that distributes SETs and their scores. We provide recommendations for identifying biased responses and quantifying average levels of bias using benchmarking questions that can highlight biased responses and adjust output scores and assessment selections accordingly.

Keywords : Lecturer evaluations; Higher education; bias; benchmarking.

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