The student evaluation of teaching and the competence of students as evaluators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new methodology for evaluating teaching effectiveness by considering student perceptions and social network centrality to address biases in student ratings, especially with small sample sizes.

Contribution

It proposes two estimators of student rating credibility based on social network centrality, improving evaluation accuracy by leveraging student perceptions of competence.

Findings

New estimators improve rating credibility assessment.

Method accounts for social network influence on ratings.

Addresses bias issues in small-sample student evaluations.

Abstract

When the college student satisfaction survey is considered in the promotion and recognition of instructors, a usual complaint is related to the impact that biased ratings have on the arithmetic mean (used as a measure of teaching effectiveness). This is especially significant when the number of students responding to the survey is small. In this work a new methodology, considering student to student perceptions, is presented. Two different estimators of student rating credibility, based on centrality properties of the student social network, are proposed. This method is established on the idea that in the case of on-site higher education, students often know which others are competent in rating the teaching and learning process.