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rates, systemic bias and outdated infor-mation that in
uence a critical part of a professor’s academic career.
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e deci-sion was postponed at a faculty meeting on April 7 until October, to give time for more discussion and deliberation on the topic. Many faculty members agree that SRIs need to be improved in regard to re-sponse rates and their use.
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e disagree-ment lies in their impact in tenure evalu-ations. Babcock and Wells have both received tenure at Augustana University, and Wells has served on the Personnel Council in the past. “A better use of them would be to en-courage individual faculty members to use them to learn about their classes, but not hang these high stakes job decisions in part on the student evaluations,” Bab-cock said.When a professor is being evaluated for a tenure promotion, they are assessed by a committee of their elected peers.
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e council, which consists of the three division chairs and three elected faculty from each division, analyzes the profes-sor on three areas: academic publication, community involvement and teaching. Communications professor John Bart describes this basic criteria as the legs to “a wobbly stool” because there is a larger emphasis on the teaching and academic publication aspects of an individual’s ca-reer.While he said he partly agrees with Babcock and Wells, Bart is adamant about the importance of SRIs in evaluat-ing a professor’s growth as a teacher. “I think that the student voice, while limited, is still an important factor to consider,” Bart said. Bart said he believes the accumula-tion of evaluations over time is one of the most valuable uses of SRIs because it shows how the professor is committed to their students. He emphasized a profes-sor’s “habit of scholarship” meaning their commitment to continuing research and to their students a
f
er they have achieved tenure.
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e quantitative data of SRIs over the course of around six years of teaching can show this commitment.Faculty also have the opportunity to write a narrative explaining their SRI data and can provide written feedback they have received from students, ac-cording to Bart. If a professor tried an unsuccessful project one semester, they have a chance to explain the situation to show commitment to growth in the classroom. In their proposal, Babcock and Wells compiled data indicating that systemic bias brings the results of SRI’s into ques-tion.
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ey point to evidence supporting race, gender and discipline bias when students are evaluating their professors. Because the evaluations are done anony-mously in order to protect students from academic repercussions, the context of evaluations are unavailable.
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e paper argues that there are too many outside factors to be able to e
ff
ectively consider SRIs in a tenure setting. “
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e relationship between the ques-tion and the criteria is complex, depend-ing on multiple parameters, and it is not clear how to extrapolate from one to the other,” Babcock and Wells state in the proposal.Even though the Personnel Council is aware of these systemic biases, it is dif-
cult to compensate entirely for the ben-e
t of the faculty member while still tak-ing into account the student voice. Senior ASA senator Mason Blue ex-pressed concern about the lack of stu-dent voice in the tenure process.
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ough there are problems with the way current SRIs are presented and received, he said that they are a useful tool that should be considered in tenure decisions. “
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ere should be e
ff
orts to improve SRIs before they are entirely removed from the process of considering the pro-motion of professors,” Blue said.President Stephanie Herseth Sand-lin oversees any changes to the Faculty Handbook, including the section con-cerning the role of SRIs and their uses. She said these assessment tools are im-perfect and should be improved upon. However, they play a key role.“We need to make sure that the stu-dent voice is a part of this discussion, not only to help faculty make adjustments and improve their own teaching, but it is important in the tenure and promotion process,” Herseth Sandlin said.When deliberating over this topic, Herseth Sandlin takes into consider-ation the possible repercussions taking SRIs out of the tenure evaluation process might have on students. She is balancing the concerns faculty have as well as pre-serving the input of students. More evaluations need to be
lled out before SRIs are considered to be an ac-curate depiction of a professor’s perfor-mance. In two separate polls posted on
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e Mirror’s Twitter and Instagram ac-counts, a little over sixty percent of stu-dent respondents thought that SRIs were too long. Bart said that in the past, SRIs were distributed on paper in class. When they moved online, participation dropped dramatically. As of right now, there is not a push towards reverting back to physical SRIs, though that does not rule them out entirely.If SRIs are taken out of consideration during these high-stake career evalua-tions, what would replace them? Babcock and Wells recognize the importance of SRIs but said they are focused on push-ing the administration to acknowledge the evaluation’s faults.As the debate continues into next fall, Herseth Sandlin said she wants to focus more on one particular question: “How do we best assess the student learning ex-perience, the classroom environment?”
Noah Wicks contributed to this report.
1. Efcacy Issues
Babcock and Wells state in their proposal that there is no evidence of SRIs o
ff
ering “reliable summative information on the e
ff
ectiveness of the instruc-tion being evaluated.”
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ey wrote that most current members of the Personnel Council “indicated that they felt the SRI contained little useful information and no unique insight was obtained from SRI data.”
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e proposal argues that “uncontrolled systemic bias” could taint the data produced by SRIs. Babcock and Wells state that there is a tendancy for female professors to be rated more negatively than male professors and a tendency for Hispanic and African American professors to be rated more negatively than white or Asian American professors.
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ey also state that there is a ten-dancy for natural science professors to be rated more negatively and humani-ties professors more positively than social science professors.
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Augustana has based its Form B SRI on recommendations by the UC-Berke-ley Center for Teaching and Learning, but Babcock and Wells cite a statement from the center that “SRI are to be used only for formative assessment” or to gauge learning. In addition, they argue that questions on the SRI are “double-barreled” or ask about multiple topics, but only allow for a single answer from respondents. Finally, they state that changes in SRI scheduling makes it dif-
cult to properly control the survey and measure the results.
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According to Babcock and Wells, SRIs could be misinterpereted if not consid-ered in the proper context.
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ey state that there are small di
ff
erences in mean values of SRI scores that could be misinterpereted, and they cite an an article by Dan Li and Steve Benton that states, “Simply put, using ones measure to make an important decision about a person’s career is the cardinal sin of psy-chological and educational measurement.”
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e proposal says that “the use of student ratings of instruction can hinder the implementation of innovative instructional strategies, especially the use of active learning techniques.” According to Babcock and Wells, feedback from peer evaluation is likely to be much more speci
c and actionable to discern poor instruction in the classroom than student feedback.
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ey say that by proliferating SRI’s, “we have been duped into thinking we are monitoring teaching e
ff
ectiveness and, in working to improve SRI, improving our teach-ing.”
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Professors Lisa Babcock and Eric Wells argue that Student Ratings of Instruction (SRIs) should be removed as a metric when considering tenure and promotion for professors. Here are the main reasons they argued in their proposal, which was endorsed by the Natural Science Division in a 33-4 vote.
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