In the coming weeks, students will participate in a ritual as familiar as it is reviled: evaluating their instructors. One of the latest and most visible critiques of these assessments came this year from Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. He cast doubt on their validity and reliability, proposing that instead, professors complete an inventory of the research-based teaching practices they use. That would be more likely to promote learning than garden-variety evaluations do, Mr. Wieman wrote in a recent issue of the magazine Change. "Current methods," he said, "fail to encourage, guide, or document teaching that leads to improved student learning outcomes." Is there a better tool out there? If student input matters, how can it be made meaningful?

November 29, 2015 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education