IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

Something (maybe the only thing) that most university administrators and educational reformers agree on is that the teaching evaluation methods used on their campuses leave a lot to be desired. The administrators often use inadequacies in the usual procedure (tabulating course-end student ratings) to justify the low weighting generally given to teaching in tenure and promotion decisions. The reformers (who include many administrators) recognize that their efforts will probably be futile unless they can provide hard evidence that alternative instructional methods really work, which will take better measures of teaching effectiveness than the ones commonly used.