Mitchem Lisa D, Rupnow Rachel L, Jaeger Collin P, Pezdek Marissa N, Ganeng Brenda K Anak, Samonds Karen E, Bergan-Roller Heather E
Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2025 Sep 1;24(3):ar35. doi: 10.1187/cbe.24-07-0193.
Student evaluations of teaching (SET) have repeatedly been shown to be biased against women instructors. Although few have been able to mitigate these biases, one team reported success in two courses by adding a short AntiBias statement to the beginning of SETs. We conducted a conceptual replication of that study to investigate the effectiveness of the AntiBias statement across a Department of Biological Sciences over three semesters. The AntiBias treatment inconsistently affected the SETs, sometimes improving women's scores but often not having any effect. Qualitative analysis showed that the types of comments students gave were mostly not affected by the conditions of treatment or instructor gender and were most frequently framed in positive connotation, implicitly about the instructor, and about course characteristics such as the logistics of the course. Our findings do not support the consistent replicability of the original work scaled to the department level yet shine an important light on SETs in the biology context. Moreover, this work suggests that a simple intervention to mitigate gender bias in teaching evaluations is not sufficient to remedy the multitude of issues with SETs. We discuss differences among studies and suggestions from the literature on ways to improve the evaluation of teaching.
学生对教学的评价（SET）一再被证明对女教师存在偏见。尽管很少有人能够减轻这些偏见，但有一个团队报告说，通过在SET开头添加一条简短的反偏见声明，在两门课程中取得了成功。我们对该研究进行了概念性复制，以调查反偏见声明在生物科学系三个学期中的有效性。反偏见处理对SET的影响并不一致，有时会提高女性的得分，但通常没有任何效果。定性分析表明，学生给出的评论类型大多不受处理条件或教师性别的影响，并且最常以积极的含义表述，含蓄地针对教师以及课程特点，如课程安排等。我们的研究结果不支持在系层面上对原始工作进行一致的复制，但为生物学背景下的SET提供了重要启示。此外，这项工作表明，一个简单的减轻教学评价中性别偏见的干预措施不足以解决SET的众多问题。我们讨论了不同研究之间的差异以及文献中关于改进教学评价方法的建议。
