Josse Delfgaauw, Associate Professor at Erasmus School of Economics and Robert Dur, Professor of Economics and President of the Royal Dutch Economic Association conducted research to examine whether the response of teachers to student feedback depends on the content of the feedback. They found that only female teachers respond to feedback and there is no effect on student evaluation scores a year later.
Delfgaauw and Dur, together with Margaretha Buurman and Robin Zoutenbier, ran a field experiment at a large Dutch school where students had to evaluate all teachers, but only a selected group of teachers received feedback. They also asked the teachers to evaluate themselves before and a year after the experiment.
The analysis showed that receiving feedback had no effect on student evaluation scores a year later. However, teachers who assessed themselves much more positive than their students before the experiment, do improve significantly after having received feedback. They also found that feedback reduces the gap between teachers’ self-assessment and students’ assessment, but only to a limited extent. Remarkably, these results are only driven by female teachers in the sample. Male teachers appear to be unresponsive to student feedback.
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The full article from IZA Newsroom, 5 February 2020, can be found here.