Students know effective teaching when they see it

So says the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a major ($45M) effort to assess teacher quality funded by the Gates Foundation. Preliminary findings were released earlier in the week.

Key quote from the report:

When a teacher teaches multiple classes, student perceptions of his or her practice are remarkably consistent across different groups of students. Moreover, student perceptions in one class or one academic year predict large differences in student achievement gains in other classes taught by the same teacher, especially in math. In other words, when students report positive classroom experiences, those classrooms tend to achieve greater learning gains, and other classrooms taught by the same teacher appear to do so as well.

There's no reason to believe that graduate students (or undergraduates for that matter) would be any less able to assess the quality of their instruction. One important thing to note is that the questions asked were not about how much students liked their teachers:

Student feedback need not be a popularity contest. We asked detailed questions about various aspects of students’ experience in a given teacher’s classroom. Some questions had a stronger relationship to a teacher’s value-added than others. The most predictive aspects of student perceptions are related to a teacher’s ability to control a classroom and to challenge students with rigorous work.

Presumably control of the classroom is much less of an issue outside of K-12, but I would imagine it would not be too difficult to craft some useful questions about challenge in the classroom.

One interesting experiment: in their assessment of graduate programs, the National Academies asked a set of students in a few subjects a set of questions about their perceptions of the quality of their education. I'd be curious to see (1) how much assessments varied from department to department, (2) to what extent assessments agree with external assessments of quality, and most importantly (3) what departmental attributes are most strongly associated with student perceptions of quality.