JPAE at 25: Looking back and moving forward on teaching evaluations

ABSTRACT

In many if not most colleges and universities in the United States, raw scores from Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are the primary tool of teaching assessment, and teaching evaluations often have real consequences for promotion and tenure. In 2005, JPAE published an article on teaching evaluations, and this article added to what was at that time a somewhat thin literature indicating that SETs are systematically biased against female faculty, and probably against older and minority faculty. Since that time, this literature has swelled and grown and now the evidence that SETs are invalid and systematically biased is too strong to ignore. Over its first 25 years, JPAE has been a force for good in public affairs education. As JPAE moves into its next 25 years, it should take a principled and evidence-based stand against the use of raw SETs as an important indicator of teaching quality, and should encourage high-quality articles studying other methods of assessing teaching so that we can learn what approaches are better.

KEYWORDS:

• Evidence-based assessment
• systematic bias
• teaching evaluations

Notes

1. Before 1998 JPAE was called the Journal of Public Administration Education.

2. NASPAA, formerly the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, is now the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration.

3. This section owes thanks to Mitchell’s 2018 article in Slate for identifying a number of interesting articles on this topic.

4. This award was later renamed after her and is now called the NASPAA Leslie A. Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award. I note that when Whittington won the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2000 she was only the second female out of 8 recipients; in the history of the award under either name, 16 males and 8 females have won this important national award (http://www.naspaa.org/principals/awards/past.asp#Leslie).

5. This result was tied with a 2-point increase in whether the instructor was judged to use student feedback, which resulted in a 0.8-point increase in the SET, cet. par. (p. 226).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather E. Campbell

Heather E. Campbell is the chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Claremont Graduate University. She received her BA from the University of California at San Diego and her MPhil and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Affairs Education from 2009 to 2010.