Student Perceptions of High Course Workloads are Not Associated with Poor Student Evaluations of Instructor Performance
نویسنده
چکیده
Many engineering faculty believe that when students perceive a course to have a high workload, students will rate the course and the performance of the course instructor poorly. This belief can be particularly worrying to engineering faculty since engineering courses are often perceived as uniquely demanding. The present investigation demonstrated that student ratings of workload and of overall instructor performance in engineering courses were not correlated (e.g., Spearman’s rho 0.068) in data sets from either of two institutions. In contrast, a number of evaluation items were strongly correlated (Spearman’s rho 0.7 to 0.899) with ratings of overall instructor performance across engineering, mathematics and science, and humanities courses. The results of the present study provide motivation for faculty seeking to improve their teaching and course evaluations to focus on teaching methods, organization/preparation, and interactions with students, rather than course workload.
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