Product Description

* Student evaluations of college teachers: perhaps the most contentious issue on campus
* This book offers a more balanced approach
* Evaluation affects pay, promotion and tenure, so of intense interest to all faculty
* Major academic marketing and publicity
* Combines original research with Berk’s signature wacky humor

To many college professors the words "student evaluations" trigger mental images of the shower scene from Psycho, with those bloodcurdling screams. They’re thinking: "Why not just whack me now, rather than wait to see those ratings again."

This book takes off from the premise that student ratings are a necessary, but not sufficient source of evidence for measuring teaching effectiveness. It is a fun-filled--but solidly evidence-based--romp through more than a dozen other methods that include measurement by self, peers, outside experts, alumni, administrators, employers, and even aliens.

As the major stakeholders in this process, both faculty AND administrators, plus clinicians who teach in schools of medicine, nursing, and the allied health fields, need to be involved in writing, adapting, evaluating, or buying items to create the various scales to measure teaching performance. This is the first basic introduction in the faculty evaluation literature to take you step-by-step through the process to develop these tools, interpret their scores, and make decisions about teaching improvement, annual contract renewal/dismissal, merit pay, promotion, and tenure. It explains how to create appropriate, high quality items and detect those that can introduce bias and unfairness into the results.

Ron Berk also stresses the need for “triangulation”--the use of multiple, complementary methods--to provide the properly balanced, comprehensive and fair assessment of teaching that is the benchmark of employment decision making.

This is a must-read to empower faculty, administrators, and clinicians to use appropriate evidence to make decisions accurately, reliably, and fairly. Don’t trample each other in your stampede to snag a copy of this book!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #576218 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

About the Author
Ronald A. Berk is Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics and Measurement and former Assistant Dean for Teaching, The Johns Hopkins University. He received the University’s Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 1993 and Caroline Pennington Award for Teaching Excellence in 1997 and was inducted as a Fellow in the Oxford Society of Scholars in 1998.He has published 11 books and 130 journal articles/ chapters. These publications reflect his unwavering commitment to mediocrity and his motto: “Go for the Bronze!” He is a popular speaker on teaching and assessment throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Michael Theall is Director, CATALYST & Associate Professor of Education, Youngstown State University

Customer Reviews

Fills a Unique Niche
Ron Berk's book does two things; it addresses the task of creating a student ratings form and presents Berk's personal philosophy about evaluating faculty. I disagree with some of the latter, but I can easily rate the book with five stars based simply on the value it provides in accomplishing the former.

Creating a good form takes so much thought and work that, unless there is a convenient reference between two covers to show you how to do the task well, the faculty time diverted into this task can be immense and the likelihood of a bad product just as immense.

The single task of adopting a student ratings form is done less than once every decade at most campuses. Adopting a form can itself be contentious, the task of creating a form onerous and not always appreciated, even when done well. Berk recognizes this, but he also recognizes good reasons why an institution may want to do the necessary work to produce its own ratings form rather than simply buy a generic form from a vendor.

Vendors can market guilt along with their form. Some will try to convince you that, because their form is based on one or more psychometrician's having established reliability and validity on that particular form through years of research, the form will serve you and your institution better than anything you could possibly design for yourself.

But there are things that vendors don't stress. One is that the ratings form too often serves as the main source of information that determines how people are retained and advanced on your campus. This is not something that people who never read your campus mission, don't work on your campus, and don't have to live with any resulting consequences should be able to control. Pick their form, and their criteria may become the major influence over personnel decisions on your campus.

Some long established forms with the intimidating research behind them had that research derived from studies of lecture-based classes. As a result, some forms can selectively reward good lecturing and cause difficulty for instructors who adopt interactive engagement techniques that generally produce better student learning. An institution that encourages faculty to be more successful in producing student learning but maintains a reward structure that favors good lecturing probably has in place a counter-productive evaluation system.

The book has its author's own unique flavor of humor. For me, his humor got in the way when he authored example items, but for others the humor made a difficult task easier. Despite the fact that some may be put off by the author's unbridled humor, the book is a thoughtful piece of work with good attention to detail. Currently, (2008) there is no better resource than Berk's book for tackling the creation of your own student ratings form.

When you create a task force to do this work, buy every member on it a copy. If you follow carefully the design guidelines and expand these to fit your own unique needs, you can create a good instrument with reasonable labor. Further, by designing your own form, your campus will end the project with (1) a form that matches doing the work unique to the campus mission, (2) a critical group of faculty who really understand student ratings and (3) complete ownership and control of a product that the campus can modify as its needs change.

Education Majors, Faculty, and Administrators - Must Read!
As a doctoral student in higher education, I have read many books on assessment and evaluation and without a doubt this is not only the most informative book on the subject with great resources, it is also one of the most enjoyable to read by an author who brings humor into this very serious subject. As educators, we are concerned with how best to transfer knowledge and build a foundation to explore and expand on issues introduced in a class. Any student of education should include this as part of his or her permanent collection, like a carpenter would include a new tool in the toolbox. Certainly administrators who are interested in improving retention and overall institutional effectiveness would benefit by employing the rigor in faculty evaluation that is discussed in this book. The bottom line is buy the book (no, the author did not pay me to say that or anything else). Read the book, then volunteer to serve on the committee that champions excellence on your campus and you will have something to contribute to the conversation that is covered masterfully by this author, Dr. Ronald A. Berk. To find read other articles and resouces that will help improve teaching effectiveness - I would suggest going to his website at [...]

Thirteen Strategies to measure College teaching
Good Book for beginners, include statistical procedures for design evaluation instruments. The examples relates a health sciences assume that you accept evaluate every aspect of the teaching act.
Buen libro para principiantes, tiene paso a paso la metodología para construir esquemas e instrumentos de evaluación de la enseñanza, los 13 pasos no son demasiados, ofrecen esa visión de 360 grados para saber que pasa en los salones. Altamente recomendable como ayuda para desarrollar una estrategia de investigación educativa, obviamente asume que se comprende y acepta la necesidad de ser evaluado y evaluar todo en el proceso educativo, incluyendo agentes externos y pares académicos. Por supuesto la gran posibilidad se sacar provecho a las observaciones de nuestros queridos alumnos, para quienes hacemos este proceso.