What do course evaluations evaluate?

It would be interesting if course evaluations evaluated teaching effectiveness. A low evaluation would mean the students did not learn much, while a high one indicated a very good teacher. For this to happen, it seems students need to be able to tell if they learned much.
Given what we know now about self-knowledge,** we shouldn’t expect students to be able to tell how effective some teaching really is. And though the evidence is early and fairly small, it looks as though students are NOT very good at assessing how well they are taught.

See the CHE Article:

In an experiment students heard the same lecture—on why calico cats tend to be female—from two instructors, one fluent and engaging, the other halting and stiff. Unexpectedly, both groups of students scored equally well on a test of the material, even though the students with the better lecturer thought they’d learned more.

** easy to read references: Thinking fast and slow, by Kahneman; The Invisible Gorilla, by Simons and Chabris

General anaesthesia (GA) for older people




Support Deric Lostutter

The Steubenville rape case helped spark a national conversation about victim-blaming and rape culture.

But the victim only got justice because Anonymous leaked significant social media evidence implicating the assailants — and for distributing those tweets, photos, and video, 26-year-old Deric Lostutter faces more prison time than the rapists got themselves.

Sign the petition here.

Obama’s strong words against rape in military

used as reason to be soft on military rapists. [Many expletives deleted.]

Navy Judge Commander Marcus Fulton has just ruled that comments made by the President regarding military rape “would unduly influence” any potential sentencing in the cases of two defendants in military sexual assault cases, U.S. vs. Johnson and U.S. vs. Fuentes. Stars and Stripes reports that, per the judge’s ruling, should the two men be found guilty, they cannot be punitively discharged because of “unlawful command influence,” meaning, because of what President Obama, as the Commander in Chief, said. Would you like to know what incendiary, unduly prejudicial, trial-influencing comments the president made, so inflammatory that if two servicemen are actually found guilty of violently raping they should not be punished?



(Thanks, T!)