Faculty Senate members are currently evaluating ways to make the teacher evaluation process more effective.

“The particular instrument we use here (at UNA) has not been proven effective at accurately measuring teacher evaluation,” said Faculty Senate President Lesley Peterson.

Peterson believes the process is important because students need to have a voice and be able to provide feedback on classroom experience, she said.

Sophomore Will Chaney does not believe the evaluations measure what they are intended to.

“I personally think that people rush to get them done because they see them as a nuisance,” Chaney said.

Teacher evaluations are used in conjunction with other sources of information to evaluate whether or not an instructor should be rehired or should receive promotions or tenure.

“We want to supplement the current system, not abolish it,” Peterson said. “Nobody wants to see it go away unless we can see something added to it.”

The research has shown there is no way of telling if the evaluations are measuring teacher effectiveness because the validity — measuring what we think we are measuring — is very low, said Assistant Professor of Psychology Gabriela Carrasco.

“Faculty Senate is suggesting the administration create a committee to look into this,” she said.

There are two different recommendations that will be set before Faculty Senate regarding the supplementation of evaluations, Peterson said.

“The first is to review the frequency on how individual faculty members are evaluated,” she said. “The other is to ask President Cale to appoint a committee to review the current system.”

Brandi McCravy, a junior, feels scantron sheets are not the best method of evaluation because most people just fill in all the bubbles without reading the questions, she said.

“I think it would be better to handwrite responses to questions or maybe even interview a random selection of students to check teacher performances,” she said.

Junior Ryan Cole said the evaluations are a waste of his time.

“I don’t go to class to evaluate my professor — I go to learn,” he said. “You should be able to tell by my grade if I learned what I was supposed to or not.”

Peterson believes administrators, faculty and students all need to be included to discuss evaluations, she said.

“We know it needs to be fixed and we know faculty aren’t the ones who can solely make changes,” she said.

Faculty Senate will make a decision on what to recommend and that proposition will go to the Shared Governance Executive Committee, and in turn they will decide whom it goes to next, Peterson said.

The next Faculty Senate meeting will be Thursday, March 13 in Floyd Science Building room 102.