What are they trying to tell me? Large-scale viability of the Start, Stop, Continue teaching evaluation method

ABSTRACT

Open-ended qualitative questions aid in participatory evaluation and are alternatives to the typical student evaluation of teaching forms. One method of qualitative evaluation consists of three prompts that ask students to comment on the aspects of the course that they feel the instructor should Stop, Start, and Continue. In order to assess the viability of this method formally, a study was performed in which students were recruited to view one of two videos that intentionally featured instructors with different teaching styles on two different occasions. Textual analysis showed that students used different words to assess the two videos and used similar terms between the two sessions. These analyses show that the open-ended questions of the SSC can act as practical alternatives to the typical close-ended questions in the student evaluation of teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching
• student course evaluations
• textual analysis
• reliability
• open-ended questions

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of Maria Musumeci and Kendall Corcoran in the collection of the data for this study, and Azure Daley for initial data analysis.

Disclosure statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caitlin M. Cunningham

Caitlin M. Cunningham is department chair and associate professor of statistics at Le Moyne College. She received her Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. Her research focuses on the application of statistics in the natural and social sciences, and she has collaborated on publications in linguistics, ecology, psychology, and physiology.

Theresa L. White

Theresa L. White is a Professor at Le Moyne College who studies the way that people think about smells, tastes, and flavours. She has had the pleasure of teaching some outstanding undergraduate students in courses such as Research Methods, Brain and Behavior, and Sensation and Perception. Over the past few years, she has served as Chair of the Department of Psychology and Chair of the Course Evaluation Task Force.