Elapsed Time Between Teaching and Evaluation: Does It Matter?

BACKGROUND: Web-based course evaluation systems offer the potential advantage of timely evaluations. The authors examined whether elapsed time between teaching and student evaluation of teaching impacts preclinical courses' quality ratings. METHOD: The overall relationship of elapsed time with evaluation rating was explored with regression and ANOVA. Time between teaching event and evaluation was categorized by weeks. Within-teaching-events means and variances in evaluations related to elapsed weeks were compared using repeated-measures ANOVA. RESULTS: With more elapsed weeks, quality mean ratings increased (P < .001) and variability decreased (P < .001); effect sizes were small (average effect size = 0.06). Trends were similar in regression analysis and for data aggregated by event. CONCLUSIONS: Summaries of event quality are negligibly impacted by evaluation timing. Future studies should examine the impact of other Web-based evaluation features on evaluation.