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Department of Economics -- Arts & Sciences

  1. Evaluation of Teaching:

    1. Student evaluations

      The Economics Department administers written student course evaluations to every student in an economics course. Summary reports are made available to each course instructor at the end of the semester, along with all student comments. The course evaluation summaries are used by the chairman in recommending salary adjustments and are an important part of the promotion and tenure process. In our Conversation, we discussed a proposed revision in our evaluation form and the accompanying summary report advanced by Ken Elzinga, who has reviewed the evaluation procedures of some other departments in Arts & Sciences. Among the changes the department approved were significant reworking of the questions, a change in response scale, and a modification of the summary report to make the results clearer. We also discussed the weaknesses of student course evaluations, among which are non-response, the tendency of extreme views to be expressed, and the selection problem inherent in any system of voluntary enrollment. This last problem refers to the fact that those who end up in a class are not a random sample of the population, but are those who have chose to stay in the class. The Departmental discussion also viewed with favor the idea of conducting some "exit interviews" of economics majors both to get feedback on our overall major program and to receive information about specific faculty members and their courses from students with a longer-run perspective on their course work. We had worked with Ned Moomaw in 1992 on such exit interviews and plan to enlist his support again. Finally, we plan to enlist the undergraduate Economics Club to organize a session at which economics majors can air their views about any aspect of the major curriculum including teaching. A faculty member in attendance would be pledged to preserve student anonymity as he or she relayed the essence of the sentiments expressed to the rest of the department. We have used such sessions at the graduate level with great success.

    2. Peer review and teaching portfolios

      Although we now use neither of these tools, at least formally, the Department is considering adding some portfolio materials to the promotion package. We did agree that portfolios were probably not as good as indicator of teaching quality in economics as in some other disciplines.

  2. Development of Teaching

    3. Here the discussion centered on graduate instructors, advanced graduate students who teach undergraduate courses independently. We currently encourage our graduate instructors to use the facilities of the teaching Resource Center, but the idea of assigning faculty mentors to first-time graduate instructors was received favorably. These mentors would sit in on classes and be available to help plan the course and answer questions about its conduct.

  3. Incentives for Superior Teaching

    4. Teaching quality is currently rewarded in both salary and promotion decisions. The question of adding additional incentives provoked a lively discussion about the relative merits of avoiding truly bad teaching versus encouraging excellent teaching. In other words, is it better to move the D teacher to a C+, or the B+ teacher to an A. That issue was not resolved. One idea for additional incentives for teaching was a program of summer support for top teachers. We agreed that this was a funding opportunity that could appeal to alumni donors and our chair will pursue it.

  4. Steps the University could take to improve teaching

    5. The Department discussed not only actions that might be taken by the Department, but also actions that only the University could take to improve teaching. Our three specific suggestions are:

    1. The University should establish as part of its central computer file on each student a digitized photograph which would then allow production (if the instructor so desired) of class lists with pictures of students. This would not be hard to do given current technology and it would certainly help faculty members learn student names, which is something students value highly.
    2. The University should establish as part of its conduct a standard required student course evaluation. It would be easy to enforce the requirement that last semester's courses be evaluated by not allowing a student to begin the next semester without doing an evaluation. This would reduce the non-response problem we have now. The evaluation would not be done in the classroom, but perhaps over the Internet or telephone, freeing valuable class time and ensuring that instructors do not affect the results. Reports can be produced with cross-tabulations by course grade, major, and GPA, because the registrar's office has all that information. We know that each department and school will probably want to ask its own questions, but this could be handled very easily on a computerized system by having a small number of core questions common to every evaluation and then some questions specific to the school, to the department, to the type of course, to the level of the course, or even to the course itself. The reporting format would be uniform over the entire University, allowing promotion and tenure committees to make better comparisons and judgments about teaching quality. Departments or schools would of course be free to do whatever they wanted to in addition to this core evaluation.
    3. Chairs to reward teaching should provide summer support or salary bonuses rather than taking our best teachers out of the classroom by giving semesters off.