Are Teaching Evaluation Questionnaires Valid? Assessing the Evidence

Because the results of student-completed teaching-evaluation questionnaires often playa role in personnel decisions made by institutions of higher education, the article reviews the principal quantitative studies that social scientists have conducted on the validity of the questionnaires. The methodological flaws in and limitations of these studies are considered, and the potential side effects of the questionnaires are discussed. The article suggests that, because the questionnaires have not been shown to measure teaching quality accurately, use of the questionnaires in promotion, retention, and tenure decisions potentially violates the employment contract offaculty members. Student-completed teaching evaluation questionnaires are a fact of life in institutions of higher education today, and they frequently playa major role in decisions on retention, promotion, and tenure. The questionnaires are ostensibly used to measure the quality of teaching, a use that is adJninistratively justified by reference to the employment contract between faculty members and their institutions: the contracts of tenure-track and tenured faculty members require evaluation of the caliber of instruction provided by the faculty member, However, the questionnaires would seem to be supportable on contractual grounds only insofar as they' correctly assess teaching quality [1]. While a faculty member who challenges a personnel decision has the burden of proving the inaccuracy of a performance appraisal by her/his institution, claims filed by current or former employees against their employers have increased rapidly since 1980 [2, pp. 1614, 1628 0.164]. It is consequently logical to expect that, if student-completed evaluation questionnaires cannot be shown to measure what they claim to measure (namely, teaching quality), college and university faculty members will start to contest