Using Student Surveys to Evaluate Teachers |:

Using Student Surveys to Evaluate Teachers

 The technology section of The New York Times released an article yesterday called “Grading Teachers, With Data From Class.” It’s about using student-level survey data, or what students themselves have to say about the effectiveness of their teachers, to supplement (or perhaps trump) value-added and other test-based data when evaluating teacher effectiveness.

I recommend this article to you all in that it’s pretty much right on in terms of using “multiple measures” to measure pretty much anything educational these days, including teacher effectiveness. Likewise, such an approach aligns with the 2014 “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” measurement standards recently released by the leading professional organizations in the area of educational measurement, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), American Psychological Association (APA), and National Council on Measurement in Education(NCME).

Some of the benefits of using student surveys to help measure teacher effectiveness:

• Student-level data based on such surveys typically yield data that are of more formative use to teachers than most other data, including data generated via value-added models (VAMs) and many observational systems.
• These data represent students’ perceptions and opinions. This is important as these data come directly from students in teachers’ classrooms, and students are the most direct “consumers” of (in)effective teaching.
• In this article in particular, the survey instrument described is open-source. This is definitely of “added value;” rare is it that products are offered to big (and small) money districts, more or less, for free.
• This helps with current issues of fairness, or the lack thereof (whereas only about 30% of current PreK-12 teachers can be evaluated using students’ test scores). Using survey data can apply to really all teachers, if all teachers agree that the more generalized items pertain to them and the subject areas they teach (e.g., Using Student Surveys to Evaluate Teachers |: