A comparison of student evaluations of instruction vs. students' conceptual learning gains

For decades, Student Evaluations of Instruction (or Teaching) have been used to evaluate the quality of teaching at universities and colleges nationwide. Often, student evaluations are the sole measurement of teaching quality in higher education, and as a result have been the subject of extensive study. While many of these investigations make claims about the correlations between student evaluations of instruction and student learning, the validity and reliability of both the methodologies and measurement tools in these studies is not clear. The study reported here uses research-based conceptual inventories, such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), to make the more rigorous claim that Student Evaluations of Instruction do not correlate with conceptual learning gains on the FCI. In addition, grading leniency by an instructor (i.e., giving easy A grades) does not correlate with increased student evaluations of instruction.