The education landscape is dotted with metrics for evaluating teacher and student performance — from standardized test scores to course passage rates, from students’ attendance to teachers’ knowledge. But, unlike in colleges and universities, student feedback is rarely sought as part of the improvement effort in primary and secondary schools.
"One impediment has been the doubt that students can provide valid and reliable responses about the quality of the teaching that they experience," writes Ronald Ferguson, senior lecturer in education and public policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School, in "Can Student Surveys Measure Teaching Quality?" That doubt should be put to rest, he argues.
"We are learning," writes Ferguson, also the faculty director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, "that well-constructed classroom-level student surveys are a low burden and high-potential mechanism for incorporating students’ voices in massive numbers into our efforts to improve teaching and learning."