Creating a “Teaching/Learning ” Evaluation Instrument For Proficiencies-Based Economics Courses

This paper describes the nature of my proficiencies-based economics courses and the “teaching/learning ” evaluation instrument I developed to help students assess what they learned and to help me determine how I could help students enhance not only their learning but also their ability to learn. The paper begins with a critique of the traditional course/instructor evaluation questionnaires, elaborates my proficiencies-based approach to teaching and learning, describes the evaluation instrument I developed, and then presents the evaluation results based on using this approach in a general, one-semester introductory economics course. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons I learned from using this new evaluation instrument with its explicit attention to teaching and learning. A Mistake One of my worst professional mistakes occurred in the late 1960s. That is when I joined several colleagues to devise a more effective course evaluation system for the Department of Economics. We were distressed by the sloppy course evaluation system recently instituted by the student government organization, the Wisconsin Student Association (WSA). Its system suffere