Introduction

Excerpt

While it is a pleasure, as guest editor, to introduce the following articles, it is also disconcerting. Across all four articles there are themes of the problems of student evaluations of teachers. In some ways, the problems reflect what I think are arguably the elements of early faculty resistance to student evaluations in the 1970s and 1980s. That resistance often centered on faculty concern that students did not know what the short-term or long-term effects of a course would be, and consequently students would not be able to evaluate professors in a reasonable manner. Faculty members were also concerned that the items on a teaching evaluation scale would not be fair and reasonable characteristics of good teaching. …