The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and features interviews with health professions educators about their scholarly work.
S2 E8 podcast is a conversation between Vic Brazil, Sebastian (Bas) Uijtdehaage, and Lauren Germain about why student evaluations of teaching (SETs) can appear ‘mindless,’ and about the inadequacies of many student evaluation systems in educational institutions.
We use a humorous but sobering article as our departure point for the conversation - A curious case of the phantom professor: mindless teaching evaluations by medical students. Bas gives us the background to the article, and we reflect on “three risk factors that may encourage ‘mindless’ evaluation practices: (i) the cognitively taxing nature of SETs; (ii) the lack of perceived impact of SETs on the curriculum, and (iii) the degree to which the evaluation task is experienced as just another routine ‘chore’.”
This challenge is compounded by a lack of reliability in SETs, poor correlation between student evaluation and learning outcomes, recent work confirming gender, racial/ethnic, and attractiveness bias in student evaluations, and the paradox of using desirable difficulties in teaching and improving learning outcomes.
But it is not all doom and gloom! Lauren and Bas offer us alternative approaches to SETs – including more authentic engagement with students, ‘prediction based’ methods, qualitative approaches such as focus groups and dialogue based evaluation, and peer observation of teaching.
Lovely wisdom from two thoughtful leaders in the field of assessment and evaluation, and closely aligned with the principles underpinning the Harvard Macy Institute Systems Approach to Assessment in Health Professions Education.
Please click here for the podcast, Happy listening!
Watch out for new episodes this year which will be announced on our blog and our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook social media channels.
Did you know that the Harvard Macy Institute Community Blog has had more than 275 posts? Previous blog posts have explored topics including systems of assessment in educational settings, online education in a hurry, and what is next for systems of assessment in educational settings.
Author BIO
Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about healthcare simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.
HMI Podcast
