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BOOK REVIEW

Techniques and Strategies for Interpreting Student Evaluations. New Directions for Teaching and Learning Series, No. 87, edited by Karron G. Lewis. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, Fall 2001, 101 pp.

One of the perpetual concerns of faculty is how to understand what students say on their evaluations at the end of the semester. Dr. Karron Lewis has spent a great deal of time helping faculty turn those comments into practical strategies to improve courses. In this volume, she brings together the collective wisdom of individuals from across the country who specialize in just this activity. The goal of the volume is to provide faculty with ideas about ways to gather and interpret student feedback.

There is an initial chapter that addresses faculty concerns about the validity and reliability of student evaluations. Written by one of the leaders in the field of assessment, this chapter takes several of the concerns that faculty commonly express and discusses the research behind those concerns, things like the size of class, the susceptibility of evaluations to grade inflation, and other issues. The chapter is written in a very readable style but backed up with a lot of solid research.

Subsequent chapters discuss how to encourage students to give more useful feedback, how to use electronic tools to gather information, how to involve student teams in ongoing feedback, and alternatives for getting midsemester feedback. These chapters are very useful, because they look at student feedback from a different perspective than the end of the semester strategies we are so accustomed to.

A second subset of the chapters deals with interpreting the comments and numbers that are the results of most end of the semester feedback. In addition to suggesting ways to write your own questions as add-ons to the Course Instructor Survey, the chapters show how to turn the written comments into more organized information. One particularly interesting chapter discusses ways of helping others interpret your student evaluations.

All in all, this very short and readable book can give any instructor much more information about gathering and using student feedback than he or she has had in the past. Perhaps this will empower individual faculty members to take more control of the process and, as a result, get more useful information and be able to convey that information more accurately. As a result, both the process of student feedback and the attitude toward it might change for the better.

Acknowledgments

This review was written for the University of Texas Center for Teaching Effectiveness newsletter, The Teaching Network, Vol. 22, No. 1, Fall 2001.

Received for publication December 18, 2001. Accepted for publication December 18, 2001.

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