Timeline for How can you determine the quality of your teaching, or someone else's?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 27, 2015 at 16:53 | vote | accept | Brian Rushton | ||
| Apr 17, 2015 at 18:43 | comment | added | BBS | @DanFox I understand your point now, and that's absolutely true. The sample size for any teacher even over the course of several years is small and is prone to error. However, I think that the public is demanding quantitative measures of teachers. Provided that these are only one part of a teacher's evaluation, and it is a piece of a more holistic approach, I feel that this is a fair compromise between the interests of teachers and the public. I think it is less prone to error than measuring this year's class against last year's class. The merit of using quantitative measures is another topic | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 15:26 | comment | added | Dan Fox | @BBS: Think of it as a sampling procedure. The samples are fairly small. Assuming uniform distribution of homogeneous students among identical classes taught by identical teachers (all quite unrealistic assumptions) what is the probability that, among all the teachers, there is some some teacher for whom aggregated measured performance declines several years in a row? That's not very well said, but the gist should be clear. It seems unlikely that the analysis is easier with realistic assumptions. | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 12:09 | comment | added | BBS | @DanFox Sorry I should have been more clear, the numbers are pure fiction and not the threshold with which we decide there has been significant change. We have not established yet exactly what will constitute a significant change in a child's performance, and for evaluation purposes it will probably involve the aggregate of a class if not all classes for a teacher. | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 11:02 | comment | added | Dan Fox | It's not at all clear that the numbers cited (70, 75, 80) are evidence of improvement or not. In any kind of reasonable model of student performance, one expects variations of this sort due to random variation. The situation is far more complicated when the data come from different classes taught by different teachers. Deciding what is genuinely evidence of improvement seems a hard problem, and it seems indefensible to use numbers like these without solving it. I trust a purely subjective assessment made by an expert teacher far more than this sort of numerical measure. | |
| Apr 17, 2015 at 7:35 | comment | added | Benoît Kloeckner | "it's not fair to expect employees to create critical evaluations of their peers" - well, as far as higher education is concerned, we are used to do this for research, so it seems one needs more to rule it out. | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 12:55 | history | answered | BBS | CC BY-SA 3.0 |