[local physicists] REMINDER: Special Seminar 9/19/2013 (Dr. Chuck Adler)

[Malin, Delicia M.]

Old Dominion University
Department of Physics

Special Seminar

Thursday, September 19, 2013

"Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness: Student scores versus direct measurements of learning"

Dr. Chuck Adler
St. Mary's College of Maryland


Many colleges have students evaluate professors using surveys such as the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) created by the University of Illinois.  Almost all such systems include questions rating their professor, the course, textbooks, and other similar things on a numerical scale.  These evaluations are used both developmentally, to help instructors improve their teaching, and evaluatively, in determining promotions, raises, and in some cases, tenure.  One very good question is whether these surveys can identify effective teaching.
        For the past seven years, the Physics department at St. Mary's College has used the Force Concepts Inventory (FCI) to directly evaluate student learning in our introductory physics courses.  The FCI is a 30 question conceptual test of introductory physics which has been used across the country to examine student learning in such classes. In this talk I will discuss the surprising results we found when we examined correlations between FCI gains (a measure of student learning), teaching methods, and student evaluation scores in these courses.  I will also discuss the three-way collaboration between the Physics department and the offices of Institutional Research and Institutional Technology, and why our study wouldn't have been possible without effective cooperation among all three.


Presentation: PSB 1100
 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.


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