Student Evaluation of Teachers and Courses in Graduate Social Work Education

This paper reports a four-year experience in using a teacher-course evaluation instrument and analyzing the results. It answers some questions about selecting itmes and scoring them, and points out serious limitation in interpretation of the data, with the single greatest problem arising from students looking at the same course and teacher on the same evaluation item and disagreeing on the rating. It leaves unanswered the question of what is really being measured when from year to year and school to school, the item means tend to be highly correlated with one another. One additional objective of presenting this study is to see if other schools, using a similar instrument, can replicate the results.