Faculty attitudes about student evaluations and their relations to self-image as teacher

With the worldwide implementation of students’ evaluation of teaching (SET), faculty attitudes and trust in students’ feedback as well as possible defensive (i.e., self-protective) motivations seem most relevant to the facilitation of the primary organizational goal of SET, namely, teaching improvement. A questionnaire—administered to 2241 faculty members of all ranks in two dozen varied institutions—measured positive attitudes and trust, on the one hand, and beliefs in salient negative faculty SET myths, on the other hand. The most widely-held negative attitudes concerned student fallibilities: vindictiveness; lack of maturity; and negative evaluations of low-achieving students. Despite believing in myths, more than half of the respondents reported trusting SET, thought that it accurately reflected their teaching performance, and considered SET-based feedback useful. A derived index comparing self-evaluations to reported students’ evaluations demonstrated that more than a third of the participants rated their own quality of teaching higher than the ratings they reported typically receiving from their students. This ‘underestimated’ group believed more intensely in SET myths and mistrusted it, which suggests a possible self-protective motivation underlying faculty attitudes. A subgroup of 9% felt strongly underestimated by their students, and a series of comparisons gave clear indications that, for this group of hard-core disgruntled faculty members, the administration of SET questionnaires and the provision of SET feedback are counter-productive. Insights from this research might encourage academic administrations to improve the implementation of SET measurement to increase faculty receptiveness and trust.     

Lay Understanding of Macroeconomic Causation: The Good-Begets-Good Heuristic

The functioning of the economic system is complex and technical. For its part, the public is constantly presented with information on economic causality. It is important for its members to assimilate this information, whether to further their personal goals or to engage advisedly in the democratic process. We presented economically untrained and trained participants with questions of the form: “If variable A increases, how will this affect variable B?” for all the combinations of 19 key economic indicators. Economically untrained participants were willing to commit themselves on most questions, despite their medium to low self‐report of understanding the concepts involved. Analysis of the pattern of responses reveals the use of a simple shortcut, the good‐begets‐good heuristic, which yields a sense of competence in the absence of understanding of the causal mechanism involved. Le fonctionnement du système économique est complexe et technique, et le public est constamment confrontéà des informations se référant à une causalitééconomique. Il est important que le public les assimile, que ce soit pout poursuivre ses buts personnels ou pour participer en connaissance de cause au processus démocratique. Nous avons présentéà des sujets, ayant bénéficié ou non d'une formation en économie, des questions sous la forme: “Si la variable A augmente, comment cela affectera‐t‐il la variable B?” pour toutes les combinaisons possibles de 19 indicateurs économiques clés. Les sujets sans formation économique sont disposés à prendre position sur la plupart des questions, malgré une auto‐évaluation assez basse quant à leur compréhension des concepts impliqués. L'analyse de la structure des réponses révèle l'utilisation d'un simple raccourci, l'heuristique “le bien engendre le bien”, ce qui leur donne un sentiment de compétence alors qu'ils ne comprennent pas le mécanisme causal en jeu.