evaluation – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading Stensaker & Matear (2025) on “Student involvement in quality assurance: Perspectives and practices towards persistent partnerships”

mglessmer — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:50:38 +0000

Including the student perspective in quality assurance of teaching is required by law in Sweden (and other places), and this means that they are asked to respond to surveys at the end of every course, have seats on all boards of education and others, and have strong, institutionalised student organisations. But of course there are […]

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Student evaluations of teaching as a “technology of power” (reading Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Freeman, 2020)

mglessmer — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 16:30:23 +0000

I just read this super interesting article about student evaluations of teaching as a “technology of power” that acts to prevent any change of the system from the status quo, that I can’t stop thinking about. The authors use Foucault’s concept of “power-knowledge”: if knowledge gets institutionalized, it takes on a life of its own […]

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Using student evaluations of teaching to actually improve teaching (based on Roxå et al., 2021)

mglessmer — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 05:05:21 +0000

There are a lot of problems with student evaluations of teaching, especially when they are used as a tool without reflecting on what they can and cannot be used for. Heffernan (2021) finds them to be sexist, racist, prejudiced and biased (my summary of Heffernan (2021) here). There are many more factors that influence whether […]

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#Methods2Go: Methods for feedback and reflection in university teaching

mglessmer — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 12:05:46 +0000

More methods today, inspired by E.-M. Schumacher’s “Methoden 2 go online!“! Today: Evaluating Flashlight I used to hate it when in in-person workshops everybody was asked to give a statement at the end, about what the most important thing was they learned, or how they liked something, or that kind of thing because on the […]

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Student evaluations of teaching are biased, sexist, racist, predjudiced. My summary of Heffernan’s 2021 article

mglessmer — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 10:06:37 +0000

One of my pet peeves are student evaluations that are interpreted way beyond what they can actually tell us. It might be people not considering sample sizes when looking at statistics (“66,6% of students hated your class!”, “Yes, 2 out of 3 responses out of 20 students said something negative”), or not understanding that student […]

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#TeachingTuesday: Student feedback and how to interpret it in order to improve teaching

mglessmer — Tue, 26 May 2020 12:05:53 +0000

Student feedback has become a fixture in higher education. But even though it is important to hear student voices when evaluating teaching and thinking of ways to improve it, students aren’t perfect judges of what type of teaching leads to the most learning, so their feedback should not be taken onboard without critical reflection. In […]

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How to know for sure whether a teaching intervention actually improved things

mglessmer — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 05:50:54 +0000

How do we measure whether teaching interventions really do what they are supposed to be doing? (Spoiler alert: In this post, I won’t actually give a definite answer to that question, I am only talking about a paper I read that I found very helpful, and reflecting on a couple of ideas I am currently […]

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