yofxThe Unofficial Blog of the Tunxis Math Department

This follows up on yesterday’s post, which had gotten a bit lengthy. I described in the last email the two measurements I’m currently taking: cumulative exam average and cumulative final exam passing percentage. I’d like to get a little more sophisticated. I know one huge thing I’m missing is retention. At the moment, the only students I’m judging my performance on are those taking the final exam. I’m not at the moment looking at how many I get to the finnish line.

Another metric might be student satisfaction, most institutions do teaching evaluations. These scores might be incorporated. All performance benchmarks being equal, it is better to have satisfied students.

What I’d also like to know is how my students are doing in the next class. This data can prove a little harder to track down, but is an excellent way to measure the attainment of basic skills. Considerations do have to be made though. Sometimes students don’t take a class directly after mine. To draw up an extreme case, what if they waited 4 semesters to take the next course? How much of what they do in that course reflects on what they learned in my class?

Let me know if you have any more ideas on how to measure teacher performance. What I would really love is to have a dashboard like one has in Google Analytics. One that would present at the end of each semester several key numbers on the mainpage, and then let you drill down from there. That would be great!

pic by vrypan

I have been getting more and more interested in this question. It is curious that in a profession in which we are constantly evaluating other’s work we get very little feedback on our own. Up to this point, I’ve been doing a little rudimentary record keeping. I teach three courses that have departmental finals. I figure the final is about as good a benchmark as I have on performance, so I basically keep track of two statistics each semester: my student’s final exam average and what percent passed the final (70 being passing). Here’s a link to the data. The semester by semester scores vary a lot. This is true for almost all my classes. Here’s the picture of my Intermediate Algebra course over the last 7 semesters.

Semester by semester performance is volatile for a number of reasons (class size, time of day, class time…). It wasn’t helping me much to set goals or understand my own performance. I switched over to a cumulative exam average and cumulative passing percent. What that means is that is if my cumulative exam average for Fall 07 is 65% that all students that I’ve taught prior to and during Fall 07 taken together averaged a 65% on the departmental final. Here’s a comparison of average score vs. cumulative average score.

You can see how much smoother the cumulative averages are. They aren’t as susceptible to all the noise that single semester stats are. They also give me a benchmark for each semester. I don’t try to beat last semester’s averages, but simply my cumulative average up to that point. So I hope I can get my intermediate algebra class next semester average more than a 72.9.

This post is growing a little longer than I like. I know in only recording these two stats I am missing quite a bit of the picture. There are so many others to talk about. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow night.

pic by Cookie Jan’s Creations