4 ms·

How important is teacher performance for students though? What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to direct

How important is teacher performance for students though? What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to directly abusing students would be bad for students, but I imagine we're talking about the quality of the education they get based on the quality of their professor's teaching ability. If we are just talking about learning qualities, isn't the selection of students in higher level academic programs already heavily curated and biased towards students who have proven they are good at learning? Shouldn't this cohort of proven learners be resistant to any fluctuations in the teaching quality of professors? Forgive me if my question shows a higher level misunderstanding, but I stumbled into my career in tech without any post-secondary education - so I don't have firsthand experience with any real academic settings.

professorthread 3y ago
The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher. Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.

4 ms·

How important is teacher performance for students though? What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to direct

by palijer 3y ago

professorthread 3y ago
The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher. Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.