Effective Teaching Evaluations
Adopted by the Council on Oct. 23, 2025
Effective Oct. 23, 2025
APS is committed to quality education and calls on physics departments and individual physicists to undertake a scholarly and holistic approach to evaluation of teaching effectiveness. This evaluation may include self-reflection and classroom observations, as well as surveys of the student experience and other forms of student input, as a portfolio that appropriately incorporates input from a variety of data sources. Research reveals that student ratings on general items such as “overall teaching effectiveness” are not good measures of learning, can discourage teaching innovation, and can be biased, including against historically marginalized communities in physics.1 Department leaders are urged to devote the time and resources needed to pursue multidimensional evaluation strategies that embody the department’s values around teaching, provide useful feedback helping faculty to develop as teachers, and support student learning.2 3
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Recognizing and Evaluating Science Teaching in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
S. R. Simonson, B. Earl, and M. Frary, “Establishing a Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness,” College Teaching (2021).
G. C. Weaver, A. E. Austin, A. Follmer Greenhoot, and N. D. Finkelstein, “Establishing a Better Approach for Evaluating Teaching: The TEval Project,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 52 (3), 25-31 (2020).