Undervisningsevalueringens dilemmaer: kontrol og udvikling – to verdener?

Abstract

Evalueringspraksisser skifter løbende, og der eksperimenteres med nye tilgan­ge, metoder og procedurer. Artiklens fokus er på dilemmaet imellem kon­trol og udvikling. Der rapporteres fra en undersøgelse af holdninger til forskellige tilgange til evaluering og udbyttet af disse. Undersøgelsen er en kvalitativ undersøgelse baseret på interviews med centrale aktører på forskellige niveauer (ledelse, lærere, studerende, studieledere og institutledere) og dokumentariske studier af materiale, på tre danske universiteter. Vi sammenligner, hvordan forskellige aktører opfatter mål med evaluering, praksis og udbytte. Alle tre tilfælde viser, at ydre krav og forventninger fører til større centralisering og mere standardisering. Selv om ledelsen forsøger at kombinere udvikling og kontrol, sker der ofte en opdeling i to paral­lelle processer. Undersøgelsen dokumenterer, at kombinationen af kontrol og udvikling i den samme undervisningsevaluering er uhensigtsmæssig: Såvel studerende som undervisere mister engagementet og savner mulig­heder for feedback og opfølgning. Det fremgår, at standardisering, centra­lisering og formalisering af undervisningsevalueringer fører til mindre ud­vikling og regnes for mindre nyttigt af såvel undervisere som studerende. Evaluation practices at Danish universities are changing continuously. There is an ongoing experimentation with new approaches, methods and procedures. Our focus in this article is on evaluation as a balancing act between control and development. We report from an investigation of key stakeholder’s attitudes to different practices and to the outcomes of those practices, having interviewed management, teachers, students, program directors and department heads at three different faculties belonging to three different Danish universities. We compare how the different key stakeholders perceive evaluation objectives, practices and outcomes within and across the three faculties. It seems clear in all three cases that external demands and expectations lead to more centralized initiatives and more standardized procedures. Even though faculty management tries to encompass both development and control objectives in the ongoing teaching evaluations, the division between evaluations for control purposes and evaluations for development purposes are clearly divided into two parallel evaluation structures. The study documents that the combination of control and development into the same teaching evaluation is counterproductive: it neither engages the students nor the teachers, it does not allow for closure of the feedback loop and it does not ensure follow-up. It is therefore suggested that more standardized, centralized and formalized teaching evaluations lead to less development and are thus less useful to both teachers and students.