Myths and Misconceptions of Student Ratings: Gender Bias and More

The Learning Scientists aim to fill the gaps between how students learn and teachers teach.

IDEA's year-end Impact Challenge is underway. The goal is to raise $25,000 to receive a $5,000 challenge match and fund our Impact Grants program.

It is heartening to know that IDEA gives back to the learning community in such important ways. I hope you have a similar sense of the value that the Impact Grants have.

IDEA staff has spent the past several months gathering feedback from our partners and constituents on what they envision to be an ideal learning opportunity. The result is a series of regional workshops with broad-based learning and skill-building opportunities related to evaluation and assessment—not just for IDEA partners, but for all higher education leaders.

Sometimes those of us who swim in quantitative data for a living can forget how enigmatic our world of “mean scores” and “statistical significance correlations” appears to everyone else. To us, this stuff seems as natural as pure spring water. But to most instructors, exhortations to inform pedagogical improvement with course feedback data can feel like a mouthful of salt water.

Recently, six institutions were awarded a 2016-2017 IDEA Impact Grant. The schools and their projects, include five focused on Teaching and Learning and one focused on Campus Climate.

A recent blog in Faculty Focus by Maryellen Weimer, so aptly titled Course Evaluations: How Can Should We Improve Response Rates?, called for a conversation around how to get students to complete ratings for the right reasons.

In the recently-released IDEA Paper #59 – Motivation: An Updated Analysis, author Marilla D. Svinicki takes a fresh look at one of the topics of greatest interest to faculty—motivating students.

Accreditation standards for professional schools are intended to uphold the ideals and standards of the profession, and thereby engender public trust by ensuring that program graduates are competent practitioners within their professions.