Opinion

Evaluating the evaluations: bias

By 2015-10-20T12:19:00

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Source: © Simon Rae

Simon Lancaster focuses on gender bias in students' module evaluations

A professor’s gender quite literally makes a difference to how they are evaluated.

Let’s start where we left off in the previous article, with me bemoaning the lack of actionable insight from the surveys my students were completing. Perhaps I was a little harsh. The students gave me positive scores, the qualitative comments were very encouraging. As for the odd gripe … well they probably hadn’t even attended the majority of my teaching.

Confirmation bias is the all-too-human tendency to select, interpret and preferentially recall information to support our already-held beliefs. Evaluations that lack incision are prime targets for an educator’s confirmation bias.

Every lecturer on our courses is evaluated against four ostensibly different categories: knowledge; enthusiasm; response to student needs; organisation and presentation. Why then is there rarely a significant difference between those four indicators? Might it be that students are actually measuring something else?

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