Department of Basic Psychological Research, School of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2010 Apr;13(2):163-7. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0128.
Student ratings have been a controversial but important method for the improvement of teaching quality during the past several decades. Most universities rely on summative evaluations conducted at the end of a term or course. A formative approach in which each course unit is evaluated may be beneficial for students and teachers but has rarely been applied. This is most probably due to the time constraints associated with various procedures inherent in formative evaluation (numerous evaluations, high amounts of aggregated data, high administrative investment). In order to circumvent these disadvantages, we chose the Web 2.0 Internet application Twitter as evaluation tool and tested whether it is useful for the implementation of a formative evaluation. After a first pilot and subsequent experimental study, the following conclusions were drawn: First, the formative evaluation did not come to the same results as the summative evaluation at the end of term, suggesting that formative evaluations tap into different aspects of course evaluation than summative evaluations do. Second, the results from an offline (i.e., paper-pencil) summative evaluation were identical with those from an online summative evaluation of the same course conducted a week later. Third, the formative evaluation did not influence the ratings of the summative evaluation at the end of the term. All in all, we can conclude that Twitter is a useful tool for evaluating a course formatively (i.e., on a weekly basis). Because of Twitter's simple use and the electronic handling of data, the administrative effort remains small.
学生评教在过去几十年中一直是提高教学质量的一种备受争议但又很重要的方法。大多数大学依赖于在学期或课程结束时进行总结性评估。而形成性评估，即每个课程单元都进行评估，可能对学生和教师都有益，但很少被采用。这很可能是由于形成性评估（大量评估、大量汇总数据、高行政投入）所固有的各种程序带来的时间限制所致。为了规避这些缺点，我们选择了 Web 2.0 互联网应用程序 Twitter 作为评估工具，并测试了它是否可用于实施形成性评估。经过初步试验和后续的实验研究，得出以下结论：首先，形成性评估与学期末的总结性评估结果并不相同，这表明形成性评估比总结性评估更能深入挖掘课程评估的不同方面。其次，离线（即纸笔）总结性评估的结果与一周后进行的相同课程的在线总结性评估结果相同。第三，形成性评估并不影响学期末的总结性评估评分。总的来说，我们可以得出结论，Twitter 是一种有用的工具，可以对课程进行形成性评估（即每周进行评估）。由于 Twitter 使用简单，并且数据的电子处理，行政工作的负担仍然很小。
