2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Many faculty members devote substantial time and energy to the pursuit of teaching excellence. While students benefit from opportunities to practice, receive feedback, and improve their skills in our courses, faculty members equally deserve constructive feedback to enhance their teaching practices. However, the dominant mechanism for evaluating teaching at many universities—the student course evaluation— does not allow faculty to learn from the pedagogical expertise of their peers nor does it provide equitable evaluations of teaching efficacy. It is well established that student evaluations of teaching at higher institutions of learning harbor significant biases [1]. Many papers have outlined this bias: courses that are easier, or where higher grades are awarded tend to receive higher ratings; faculty of color and female faculty tend to experience bias in their student evaluations which inherently leads to lower ratings [2]. As many universities rely on student course evaluations as a primary metric by which teaching efficacy is evaluated, there is a pressing need for equitable teaching evaluation processes, particularly in light of the inherent biases that research has shown to exist in traditional student course evaluations.

Analysis of recent student course evaluations at Duke University (Fall 2018 to present) revealed that the existing student course evaluation ratings at our institution often reflect gender and demographic biases, disproportionately affecting female and minority faculty members. Quantitative data demonstrated that male students tend to rate male instructors more favorably, while female students rated female instructors higher than their male counterparts—highlighting the subjectivity and inherent inequity in course evaluations. (A limitation of the institutional data available for this analysis is that it reports sex, not gender.) The experiences shared by faculty in our group underscored these findings, with many female faculty reporting negative experiences tied to biased evaluations, ranging from unfair grading criticisms to disparaging comments unrelated to teaching effectiveness.

In Spring 2024, a group of five instructors from Duke University established the Peer Observation for Engineering Teaching (POET) community of practice. This initiative was driven by two factors: 1) the desire to create a supportive network for faculty focused on idea exchange and peer-to-peer feedback and 2) the desire to provide additional perspectives on teaching efficacy to complement student course evaluations.

Our community of practice met every three weeks, attended seminars, and engaged with faculty from other institutions to learn about best practices in peer observation of teaching. Central to our process were systematic observations of each other’s classes, followed by structured discussions to share insights and constructive feedback. Through these collaborative efforts, we recognized the importance of continuous professional development, the need for a formalized structure for peer teaching evaluations, and experienced first-hand the benefits of reflective conversations with our peers.

We are now engaged in a pilot year of a structured peer teaching observation and evaluation process. This now-six-person initiative aims to promote equity in teaching evaluation and provide constructive and actionable feedback, thereby supporting both our faculty as they strive for continuous improvement in their teaching and our institution in its efforts to evaluate teaching efficacy for reappointment and promotion. Key components of our proposed framework include multi-faceted assessments incorporating student, peer, and self-reflections, as well as an emphasis on transparency and fairness throughout the evaluation process. Our objectives during the upcoming pilot year include refining the observation process with an eye toward uniformity in an effort to mitigate biases in evaluation and feedback, assessing the time commitment required for effective peer evaluations, and evaluating the pros and cons of observers being familiar or unfamiliar with the subject matter. Additionally, we aim to gather feedback from participants to ensure that the process remains beneficial for all faculty involved, ultimately leading to enhanced teaching quality and a more supportive academic environment that facilitates a community of lifelong learners.

1. L. MacNell, A. Driscoll, and A.N. Hunt. What’s in a name: Exposing gender bias in student ratings of teaching. Innovative Higher Education, 40:291–303, 2015.
2. D. Reid. The role of perceived race and gender in the evaluation of college teaching on ratemyprofessors.com. Diversity in Higher Education, 3(3):137–152, 2010.
3. B. Schmidt. Rate my professor visualization. https://benschmidt.org/2015/02/06/rate-my-professor/, 2015. Accessed on June 3, 2024.