Christian's Corner On the Likert Scale

One of the rituals that we will soon all go through, in preparation for the end of the semester, is the student evaluation. This is a questionnaire that will ask you to put a number from 1 to 6 (no fence-sitting on the 3 anymore!) on every important aspect of the class experience. Professors can then use this information to improve their courses.

Question 4, for example, asks whether the teacher utilized effective teaching strategies. This translates into the question, was there variety? My natural tendency is to walk into class and talk out loud about some text that is being read. Left to my own inclinations, I'm a one-trick pony. But I've learned to throw in a video now and again, or maybe have a group discussion about something students really know very little about, in order to improve my scores on question 4. Are they effective teaching strategies? How should I know? All I know is that I improved my score by doing so.

I think this is the problem with those numbers in general. They allow us to confuse and sometimes replace quality with quantity. The temptation, for those of us faculty members who haven't achieved permanent status yet, is to "teach to the evaluation form." This is no different than the student temptation to take notes just for the test or to care about the diploma rather than the degree.

This raises a question: How can we make education about education and not merely about getting a job (for students) or keeping a job (for faculty)? I'd like to get rid of the Likert scale altogether, that dreaded 1-5 now "new and improved" 1-6 scale, but I'm told that we have to have those numbers to do institutional research. So, I will resist the temptation to call for a campus-wide boycott on the practice of filling bubbles. But that leaves me with the question unanswered. Any suggestions?

Email: christian.early@emu.edu