Using Echo Technique to Construct Student-Generated Faculty Evaluation Questionnaires

Authors describe a procedure for construction of evaluation instruments that clearly are preferred by students, and reflect their views. Questionnaires for evaluating teaching performance are usually nomothetic instruments, written by faculty. That is, they are based on the twin assumptions that (a) generally, all students are essentially alike, within and across universities, and (b) specifically, all students are like the item writer, who is usually a professor and therefore a member of the population to be evaluated rather than the population who will respond to the items. In Bem and Allen's (1974) terms, the writing and use of such questionnaires imposes the writer's equivalence class on the subjects: The question-naire items form the equivalence class, "important aspects of teaching performance, " in the mind of the writer, bu