Innovation and Risk
The student evaluations can also be analyzed to obtain
some information on the risks of making teaching
innovations such as the modified instructional cycle.
Since student evaluations are used for tenure,
promotion, and salary decisions, the impact of
innovation on student evaluations may pose a risk to the
instructor. This issue of risk was assessed with two
types of analyses.
First, the overall rating of this course was compared to
the department, college, and university norms as well as
the instructor's past history of course evaluations for this
course. The overage rating for this course was 4.06 (N =
28) on a 5-point scale ranging from poor (1) to excellent
(5). This mean overall evaluation was compared to the
means for same question for the department (4.36), the
college (4.25) and the university (4.26). The overall
class rating is not significantly lower than any of these
reference values (t (28) = -1.56, -0.97, and -1.02,
respectively, which are non-significant differences).
Since this instructor typically had course evaluations at
or above the department and college means, the overall
class evaluation is also slightly lower than his typical
evaluation. Given the variability in the class evaluations
across students and the limited sample size, the safest
conclusion for the overall ratings is that the innovation
did not appear to make a strong negative impact on
course evaluations although it may have had a slight
negative impact.
The second analysis to evaluate the risk of innovation
was to compare the qualitative student evaluations of
the self-assessments and on-line quizzes with their final
course evaluations. If student positive or negative
reactions to innovation would strongly color their
evaluations of the course, this potentially poses a risk to
the instructor. To examine this issue, the student
positive, neutral, or negative reactions to self-
assessments and on-line quizzes were used to predict
each of six class evaluation items. None of the six
analyses even approached statistical significance.
One final analysis was to condense the six class
evaluation items into one factor score representing
