TPC-Journal-V2-Issue1

86 The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 1 directly address random selection and random assignment issues, we aggregated class section scores instead of individual student scores, thus reducing the effect of individual outliers. By using the aggregate mean for each career planning section, individual students’ evaluation of the teacher remained anonymous yet the evaluation of the course section remained intact. The second limitation described by other researchers is the small number of participants in the career class analyzed. Over a six-year period we were able to collect data from almost 1,500 students from 57 sections of the course. The third limitation we attempted to address was the lack of equal representation of different ethnic groups. While we did not have equal percentages of students from different ethnicities, the demographic composition of our sample closely matched the composition of our university. Perhaps the greatest strength of this study’s design was the replication of the intervention. That is, because the course structure and specific assignments were very similar for all sections, in effect the replication of the career course occurred across all 57 of the course sections analyzed. In each section, the course content and procedures were clearly specified and grades were based on the successful execution of a performance contract by the student. Earned and Expected Grades We examined how schedule influenced mean earned grade (EG) and expected grade (XG) scores. Like Vernick et al. (2004), we found that sections meeting only once per week over 16 weeks (format W) had the lowest EG, though not significantly lower than formats MW/TuTh and MWF. By contrast, schedule MTuWTh had a significantly higher EG than all the other formats, suggesting that a 6-week semester of 2-hour class meetings four times a week was more conducive to learning than a 16-week semester of classes meeting one, two, or three times per week for 3 hours, 1.5 hours, or 1 hour, respectively; that is, the “mega-dose” of career development interventions given in the course were intensified with MTuWTh. Further analysis of the difference between mean section EG and XG scores enables us to compare the students’ view of their performance in the course with their actual performance. Ideally, we would prefer that there not be a significant difference between XG and EG in order to increase students’ confidence about the fairness of the grading and their sense of having mastered the material in the course. Expanding on these points, when the section mean XG was significantly higher than the mean EG, students could have left the course with a sense of failure and disappointment. Interestingly, in this study schedules W and MW/TuTh had significantly higher mean XG than mean EG, indicating an incongruity between the expected and earned grades. By contrast, for both schedules MWF and MTWF, the difference between mean XG and mean EG was not significant. One might conclude that fewer course meetings per week increased the difference between XG and EG scores. Student Evaluation of Teaching With regard to SET, there were no significant differences between the four class schedule formats, although we had suspected this might be the case. Perhaps a significant difference between section means for SET and XG would describe an incongruity between the students’ estimate of instruction quality and their evaluation of their own performance in the course. If XG were significantly higher than SET, this finding might indicate that students in these sections believed their performance was more related to their abilities and efforts rather than course instruction. By contrast, sections with significantly lower XG than SET scores may have rated instructors’ presentation of material higher than their own performance in the course. Interestingly, for schedules W, MW/TuTh, and MTuWTh, XG was significantly higher than SET, suggesting that students evaluated themselves more favorably than they did their instructors. We found it curious that for schedule MWF alone, XG was not significantly higher than SET. Finally, EG is assigned to the student by the instructor, while SET is assigned to the instructor by the student. By comparing mean EG with SET, we can examine the relationship between an instructor’s evaluation of his or her students with students’ evaluation of the instructor. When EG is greater than SET, this means that instructors evaluated their students more favorably than they themselves were evaluated; conversely, when SET is greater than EG, students evaluated instructors more favorably than they themselves were evaluated. For schedules W, MW/TuTh, and MWF, there were no significant differences between mean EG and SET scores. However, for MTuWTh, in which students achieved a significantly higher mean EG than the other formats, the EG also was significantly higher than the SET, suggesting that this high-performing group had higher expectations for their instructors than they felt the instructors met.