Evaluating the quality of middle school mathematics teachers, using videos rated by college students

Using experts in teaching to evaluate pre-college mathematics teachers is both time consuming and costly. This study examines the potential of letting undergraduate mathematics students perform this task, comparing their ratings of two dimensions, richness of instruction and mathematical correctness, to those previously assigned by an expert. Using 85 undergraduates of two U.S. institutions, who independently watched short videos of teachers, we found that student ratings of teachers' correctness were a good match to the expert ratings; student ratings of richness of instruction, less so. A "halo effect" was observed in that students did not fully differentiate between richness and correctness in their ratings. Moreover, male students gave harsher ratings than did female students. Whereas undergraduates showed promise in accurately evaluating teachers of younger students, improvements in terms of rating items, attention to bias, and explicit training on the teaching dimensions to be rated should be addressed.