I recently came across this article in a Science magazine email blurb and thought that others might be interested. Although some faculty worry that trying different pedagogical methods can be detrimental to promotion, the bottom line is that Active Learning techniques are more likely to help one’s student evaluation scores as well as improve learning outcomes for your students, and in particular for underrepresented students (for a recent example: The use of an active learning approach in a SCALE-UP learning space improves academic performance in undergraduate General Biology So it’s not just students that can benefit, student evaluations of faculty teaching can improve too!
Article:
Will my student evaluations decrease if I adopt an active learning instructional strategy?
American Journal of Physics 86, 934 (2018)
Charles Henderson, Western Michigan University
Raquib Khan, University of Colorado Boulder
University of Colorado Boulder
American Journal of Physics 86, 934 (2018)
Charles Henderson, Western Michigan University
Raquib Khan, University of Colorado Boulder
University of Colorado Boulder
ABSTRACT: College instructors are often afraid to use active learning instructional strategies because they fear that students may complain and/or give them lower evaluations of teaching. In this paper, we present data from a survey of 431 physics instructors who had attended the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop and who attempted to incorporate active learning into their introductory course. Nearly half of respondents (48%) felt that their student evaluations increased, one-third (32%) felt that their student evaluations had not been impacted, and one-fifth (20%) felt that their student evaluations decreased. Thus, contrary to common fears, for these instructors the most likely result from the incorporation of active learning was an increase in student evaluations.