On Students’ (Mis)judgments of Learning and Teaching Effectiveness.

AUTHORS: SHANA K. CARPENTER, AMBER E. WITHERBY & SARAH K. TAUBER

Students’ judgments of their own learning are often misled by intuitive yet false ideas about how people learn. In educational settings, learning experiences that minimize effort and increase the appearance of ﬂuency, engagement, and enthusiasm often inﬂate students’ estimates of their own learning, but do not always enhance their actual learning. We review the research on these “illusions of learning,” how they can mislead students’ evaluations of the effectiveness of their instructors, and how students’ evaluations of teaching effectiveness can be biased by factors unrelated to teaching. We argue that the heavy reliance on student evaluations of teaching in decisions about faculty hiring and promotion might encourage teaching practices that boost students’ subjective ratings of teaching effectiveness, but do not enhance—and may even undermine—students’ learning and their development of metacognitive skills.

If Teaching Evaluations Don’t Measure Learning, What Do They Do?

Authors: Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Mary B. Hargis

Because student evaluations of teaching are so commonly used to assess instructor performance, there has been a great deal of recent attention on the extent to which such evaluations are reliable and valid. Carpenter et al. (2020) have synthesized this literature to compellingly demonstrate that teaching evaluations are not predictive of student learning. While course evaluations should be treated with caution, they may still provide useful qualitative feedback, predict which teachers are inspiring their students to future study, and give students a voice, which creates a sense of fairness and comes with a host of positive externalities. As such, while we believe there is still value in having students evaluate their teachers, we recommend that teaching evaluations should be used primarily to help teachers improve their craft, rather than as a means of evaluation.

The Confidence-Accuracy Relationship Using Scale Versus Other Methods of Assessing Confidence.

Authors: Jamal K. Mansour

Historically, researchers have collected eyewitness identiﬁcation conﬁdence using scales (e.g., 0–100%; Not at all conﬁdent to Completely conﬁdent). However, in practice, eyewitnesses are more commonly asked to give their conﬁdence in their own words or to explain why they made their decision (i.e., a verbal statement). Two experiments examined whether the relationship between conﬁdence and accuracy was similar across different methods of asking about conﬁdence. Conﬁdence was predictive of accuracy regardless of the way it was collected. However, the data raise concerns about how to make sure that interpretations of verbal conﬁdence statements match the eyewitness' actual confidence level.

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