Experiments on the Evaluation of Course Instruction

Abstract

Two experiments on direct evaluation procedures are described below. The first involved students' judgments of how well they understood well defined terms and concepts presented in a course. The judgments were made anonymously to avoid instructor deprecation of poor performances and specific pressures for grade achievement. It was considered that such responses should reflect permanent aspects of instruction better than responses to less well defined stimuli referring to broad aspects of instructional procedures. In the second experiment, resposnes to short examination-type questions were obtained again under the same conditions of anonymity. In both experiments a simple index was used to assess the merit of instruction and the variability attending the index was assessed. Analysis showed that the index was, in fact, sufficiently sensitive to detect differences due to instruction even though relatively small numbers of students were involved.