Utilization of feedback from student evaluation of teachers

Students who had completed a part of the medical course rated their teachers on a multiple choice-type questionnaire. Each teacher was provided with data from his own rating, and also the mean rating for all teachers, on each item. Six of these teachers were re-rated after a year by the next group of students who followed the same course. Positive change, often significant, was observed in the majority of instances. Such change was not, however, confined to behaviours previously hypothesized to be easily amenable to improvement on feedback. There was evidence of a tendency to unidirectional change within each teacher across most behaviours, some showing predominantly positive and others predominantly negative change at the second evaluation. These results are discussed in relation to the need for counselling following such evaluations. The second evaluation lent itself to determining the possibile existence of a 'halo effect' arising from students of one ethnic group evaluating teachers of the same ethnic group. Such an effect was found to be absent. The reliability of the measurements was tested in serveral ways.