"@ALF wrote:
Wow. I am NOT buying this, not even a little bit.
@marvin100 So which part of this (seemingly credible, large-scale) meta-study’s methodology do you think is flawed? Because your anecdata definitely doesn’t refute it in the slightest."
I don’t know how well evaluations correlate with learning, because I haven’t seen the evaluations, but I do know that teacher quality correlates significantly with learning. If I had this research result, I would want to go back and look at my assumptions and the specific surveys used.
Maybe the evaluations in the study were poorly written. If the teacher evaluations are not well written, you may not learn what you want to know from them. That is obvious to me. Poorly written evaluations may be just telling you which teachers are easy, nice, or give less homework.
One teacher my D learned the most from is an excellent teacher, but also a first class jerk of the highest rank. Is the survey written well enough to identify his very bad behaviors, while also recognizing that his students learn more than any other instructor in the department? If I am @Alf, I want to understand both of those nuances as I work to understand which teachers are adding value and why?
I agree with @Alf etal, that professors make a huge difference. If s/he is thoughtful, s/he should be able to get valuable information from the surveys. The fact that this research of other people’s surveys shows no correlation just suggests to me that you have to be thoughtful about the specific questions and how the students are likely to think about the question when responding. You also need to avoid asking overly generic questions. If you just ask students to rate a professor from 1-10, it is too broad, and I am not surprised at the result at all.