Technology Teacher 05/11/2015

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  -when asked the right questions, in the right ways—students can be an important source of information on the quality of teaching and the learning environment in individual classrooms. -Analysis by the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project finds that teachers’ student survey results are predictive of student achievement gains. Students know an effective classroom when they experience one. - Even a high-quality observation system entails at most a handful of classroom visits, while student surveys aggregate the impressions of many individuals who’ve spent many hours with a teacher - Teachers want to know if their students feel sufficiently challenged, engaged, and comfortable asking them for help. Whereas annual measures of student achievement gains provide little information for improvement (and generally too late to do much about it), - Not every survey will produce meaningful information on teaching. Not to be confused with popularity contests, well-designed student perception surveys capture important aspects of instruction and the classroom environment. - four overriding requirements of any system considering student surveys as part of formal feedback and evaluation for teachers: 1. Measure what matters. Good surveys focus on what teachers do and on the learning environment they create. 2. Ensure accuracy. Student responses should be honest and based on clear understanding of the survey items. 3. Ensure reliability. - Reliability requires adequate sampling and an adequate number of items—but without overtaxing students 4. Support improvement. Measurement for measurement’s sake is wasted effort. Teachers should receive their results in a timely manner, understand what they mean, and have access to professional development resources that will help them target improvement in areas of need. Student surveys are as much about evaluating systems of support for teachers as they are about diagnosing the needs within particular classrooms. -Benefits to Student Perception Surveys 1. Feedback. Results point to strengths and areas for improvement. 2. “Face validity.” Items reflect what teachers value. 3. “Predictive validity.” Results predict student outcomes. 4. Reliability. Results demonstrate relative consistency. 5. low cost. Expense of administration is minimal. - Tripod is designed to measure teaching, student engagement, school norms, and student demographics. To measure teaching, the survey groups items under seven constructs, called the “7 Cs”: Care, Control, Challenge, Clarify, Confer, Captivate, and Consolidate. -students’ level of agreement on a fivepoint scale. Here are two items under “Clarify”: ■ “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in class.” ■ “My teacher knows when the class understands and when we do not.” - These results don’t show how survey results relate to student achievement—that is addressed further on—but the contrasts suggest that students are capable of discerning -“stakeholder perceptions”—including student survey responses—account for 5 percent of teachers’ overall ratings. Other components include: -■ Classroom observations: 40% ■ Student achievement/learning gains: 50% ■ Evidence of content knowledge: 5% - For a survey to be predictively valid, it means that, on average, the teachers who get the most favorable survey responses are also those who are helping students learn the most. -Over time, alignment with student outcomes could deteriorate. This could happen if somehow teachers altered their actions in ways that improved their survey results, but without improving their underlying performance on practices associated with better outcomes. In such a situation, a system would see that teachers’ rankings based on survey results bore little relationship to their students’ learning gains. -Survey items need to be clear to the students who respond to them. -Good Questions: “The comments that I get on my work in this class help me understand how to improve.” -Well-designed surveys account for the fact that not all students read at the same grade level. -Confidentiality for students is a nonnegotiable if surveys are part of formal feedback and evaluation. If students believe their responses will negatively influence how their teachers treat them, feel about them, or grade them, then they’ll respond so as to avoid that happening. -Although in many situations teachers will distribute student perception surveys in their own classrooms, no teacher should receive back a completed survey form that would allow the teacher to identify who filled it out. In the MET project, following procedures generally employed in administering Tripod, paper surveys were distributed to students with their names on peel-off labels that they removed before completing them.All that remained on the form when they finished were unique bar codes to let researchers link their responses to other data collected for the study but which no school personnel could use to identify respondents. Students also placed their completed forms in opaque envelopes and sealed them -Along with the quality of the items used, reliability is in part a function of how many items are included in a survey. Both reliability and feedback can be enhanced by including multiple items for each of a survey’s constructs. -“If you don’t understand something, my teacher explains it another way.” ■ “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in class.” - It’s of little help to a teacher to be told simply “you scored a 2.7 out of 4.0 on ‘Care.’ ” - For most people, improvement requires the example and expertise of others. While student surveys can help point to areas for improvement, they can’t answer the question: Now what? Motivation without guidance is a recipe for frustration. -Often the best way to help teachers understand what student perception surveys are, and what they are not, is to share the items, to point out what makes them well-designed, and to show their alignment with teachers’ own views of quality instruction. -

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