I'm often asked about how college professors are evaluated and what these evaluations look like. As a faulty member I'm evaluated by peers and by a committee for merit evaluations each academic year. In addition to the peer and merit reviews, my teaching is surveyed each semester by the students I teach. Some semester I teach undergraduates, other semesters graduate students and some semesters I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses. I have included the "CIS" student surveys that I received for the SPG 2012 semester here for general examination. The survey includes fill in the blank choices using the common Likert Scale as well as an opportunity for extended comments. The range of scores is from 0-5 with "5" being the highest score.
The course I was teaching for this survey was a course in Elementary Science Methods and it met for 3 weeks on roughly a daily basis. The course was done in coordination with efforts in the Manor School District to train teachers in Project based Instruction (PBI) at the elementary level. the Manor Independent School District (M.I.S.D.) is unique in its emphasis on project based instruction throughout the district. All University of Texas students in this particular cohort were taught project based instruction in EVERY content area (science, mathematics, english, history, etc...). It is a very exciting program.
Instructor surveys are often not shared in public and are somewhat of a "blackbox" to people outside the University community. I offer this insight for the many who have sent me requests asking for me to post something about the topic. Hopefully, this will address some questions. -Dr. Petrosino
Picture: Grand Bakery, Hoboken NJ (circa 1989)
