• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Expectation and Assessment

How is this conflict of expectation mediated? Student assessment of faculty is a bureaucratic, not an educational exercise. An immense bureaucratic system of managing faculty's assessment of students is installed. Both reveal an absence of trust. There is no trust because there is so little in common between the perspectives of scholars in a discipline and students educationally socialized in the way I have described. (Historians may connect the development of this apparatus to the conflicts of authority in the 1960s which drastically changed paternalistic norms into norms driven by due process.)

Yet not only is trust a casualty, so also is the way in which we publicly understand teaching and learning quality. For the purposes of both excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching, a fascinating paradox then arises, pointed out by Stenhouse. "The more objective an examination" (or assessment pattern) "the more it fails to reveal the quality of good teaching and good learning" (p. 95). In other words, the forms we presently use to assess students may actually serve to conceal from us the quality of good students and the weaknesses of poor students and, of course, the quality of their teachers.

The student evaluation of faculty may do the same. A teacher who is a critic or who makes students struggle with ideas may not be assessed "well" by students precisely because he or she is challenging both their background and their motivation. A student who appreciates being critically taught is reduced to a mere statistic. The quality of our practice then becomes framed by what the students like in terms of a teacher-learner relationship hooked into their immediate motivation, not by what they need educationally in being shown other motives. Unsurprisingly, an early review of the student evaluation process, according to George Mason University psychologist Bob Pasnak, found reliability only in the way it told us whether there was teacher-student rapport.

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