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This is your reminder that even though openness to feedback is important, you shouldn't let a few nasty student evals get to you.

Evals are not correlated with learning, are formed on snap judgements, reflect student biases, and often demean good teaching.

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First - Student evals don't reflect student learning.

Not at all.

Really.

A student's rating of your effectiveness is not related to how much you helped them learn.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Second - Course Evals represent student's biases-- in terms of ethnicity and gender and also in terms of age, attractiveness and a bunch of other things that shouldn't matter but do show up in their ratings.

dspace.lafayette.edu/handle/10385/1…

Third, while student learning does *not* strongly drive student evals, a bunch of mercurial factors do: snap judgments made on the first day, one email you didn't answer, and/or how fluently you happen to speak...

Fourth, student evals can often demean good teaching approaches.

In particular, students may resist active learning techniques due to their novelty, requirement for participation, and/or perception that they aren't being taught.

For example:
pnas.org/content/116/39…

Here's my favorite experience of this last point. This is an eval comment from an *education major* the first semester I re-designed a course for more active learning. This student *HATED* the approach because she was "forced to read".

6 years later this still burns me up.

I'm not saying evals have 0 value. I want students to thrive on feedback and I want to take in their feedback and make good use of it, too.

But each semester it is important to remind yourself that your evals do not define you or the worth of your valiant efforts.

And admins: Can we please get a filter that weeds out the handful of vindictive/mean comments so that we don't have to have them rattling in our heads all winter break?

I hate tossing in bed each night of late December with come-backs to nasty student evals in my head.

Oh, and I know there were much better sources I could have linked and many course eval researchers I could have tagged... make sure to note my disorganization and lack of concern in my course eval.

End with some self-care tips:

wiley.com/network/instru…