Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Vol 9(3), Sep 2023, 254-263; doi:10.1037/stl0000222
Sweeping changes occurred in higher education during the Spring 2020 academic term. Spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) led colleges and universities to close their campuses and shift in-person classes to online instruction. The change was followed by predictions that student evaluations of teaching would be negatively affected by the pandemic and should be temporarily altered or cancelled to protect faculty. To examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student evaluations, the current research explored trends in undergraduate student evaluation surveys at a small, private college. The data set included all student evaluations for in-person and online courses from Spring 2018 through Spring 2020 (N = 26,804). For Spring 2020 in-person courses that switched to online format, overall ratings of course and instructor increased by a small but significant amount compared with previous semesters (Cohen’s d