Thick slice and thin slice teaching evaluations

Student-based teaching evaluations are an integral component to institutions of higher education. Previous work on student-based teaching evaluations suggest that evaluations of instructors based upon “thin slice” 30-s video clips of them in the classroom correlate strongly with their end of the term “thick slice” student evaluations. This study’s results support previous findings, but also find that thick slice student evaluations are better than thin slice evaluations. The findings are interpreted to suggest that thick slice evaluations capture course content variables not reflected in thin slice evaluations.