Build a Better Teaching Evaluation

How colleges can effectively assess instruction and improve learning outcomes

Teaching evaluations play an influential role in academic careers, shaping decisions about promotion, tenure, and professional development. Yet many instructors and researchers argue that traditional evaluations — particularly those conducted by students and peers — can be skewed by bias and often fail to provide meaningful guidance for improving teaching.

This collection of Chronicle reporting and opinion essays explores the longstanding debate over how colleges assess teaching effectiveness. The collected articles examine research on bias and fairness in evaluations, consider questions about how evaluations are used in promotion, and highlight efforts to redesign evaluations to produce more useful feedback.

In this collection, readers will also explore broader changes in the classroom, including evolving expectations of students and shifting faculty-student dynamics, providing essential context for understanding what teaching evaluations measure.

Date: June 2026
Pages: 94
Digital file size:  4.94 MB

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