The May 2020 report to Senates on student evaluations of teaching also included recommendations for a more holistic approach to evaluating teaching, and for further analyses of results:
Units should be supported to adopt a scholarly and integrative approach to evaluation of teaching (Recommendation 10)
- The Student Experience of Instruction Implementation Committee and others have written a discussion paper about a holistic approach to evaluating teaching that integrates multiple sources of data. It includes an overview of some of the teaching evaluation practices at UBC, examples of holistic evaluation practices at other universities, and a set of recommendations. This paper is feeding into work on revising Senate policies on teaching evaluation, is being undertaken by a dual-campus working group.
UBC should prioritize work to extract information from text/open comments submitted as part of the feedback process (Recommendation 12)
- The Student Experience of Instruction Implementation Committee is investigating automated processes that can help instructors better glean meaning from large amounts of text, to use to reflect on students’ experience of their teaching. A report on findings, including testing some of them with a limited number of volunteers, will be finalized in Fall 2022.
UBC needs additional and regularized analysis of our own data to answer questions related to potential bias, starting with instructor ethnicity, as it is frequently highlighted as a potential source of bias in the literature on student evaluation of teaching (Recommendation 13)
- The Planning and Institutional Research office (PAIR) is working with the Equity and Inclusion Office to be able to access demographic data for faculty from the UBC Employment Equity Survey and is undertaking one or more analyses of SEI data for bias in Spring and Summer 2022.