Student questionnaires have always been considered a powerful tool in college when it came to evaluating how a teaching assistant was doing. However, the results were usually tainted by how much students generally liked a given TA, not on how effective the TA was at doing the teaching.
That’s why, when I taught, we would also look at the grades our students received, combining them with the survey results into some “big picture” evaluation of our performance as TAs. In a total of 25 sections of introductory biology, there were about 50 A’s given out. Three of them were from my class, which was slightly above the average, but that could have been due the luck of the draw, with me getting more smart kids than other TAs.
Now the Panorama Education group is trying to make it possible for schools to use student surveys more productively. They’re looking to change our old, qualitative ways of using student surveys by developing better questionnaires that can be quantified. The surveys can then be applied consistently to teacher evaluation scores and lead to improvements in their teaching, the New York Times reports.
They’ve developed what they think might be valid survey technology, asking about a variety of factors that might affect a teacher’s performance. Their questions deal with how well a teacher conveys the material, whether she encourages interest in a subject, and whether a school fosters a sense of belonging for students.
The start-up has backing from tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Google Ventures, the search company’s investment arm. They’ve developed new technology that significantly cuts the cost of capturing student responses, scoring them, and feeding them back to schools on an efficient dashboard.
And just last week, Panorama announced they would make the student survey tool open source, meaning schools, districts, states, etc., could modify it according to their own needs. The open source framework will allow an expansion of this technology in such a way that teachers aren’t reduced to a few statistics. A more detailed narrative can be available, given adequate development time and testing.
