The Use of Student Ratings in Promotion Decisions.
The tight job market for tenured academic positions heightens demands for fairness and accountability in the award of tenure. Most colleges and universities attach great importance to teaching ability in criteria for promotion, yet faculty members everywhere believe that the formal criteria claim more weight for excellent teaching than is actually accorded it. This discrepancy, we believe, rests partly on how data about teaching is presented to promotion committees. We tested the effect on promotion decisions of two different methods of presenting data from student evaluations. This study derives from theories of influence developed in social psychology and communications. Hovland, Janis, and Kelley [4] suggest a sequential process of attention, learning, and acceptance as the framework for psychological studies of communication and persuasion. One key element in persuasion is supporting evidence for the recommended opinion. Eagly [2] found that the amount of supporting evidence and the affective reaction to it influence the comprehensibility of persuasive arguments. In their experimental study of undergraduates' choices of psychology courses, Borgida and Nisbett [1] found that concrete, oral information from previous students had a greater impact on students' decisions than abstract, statistical summaries of student ratings. This study is but one of several that find that face-to-face case histories are more persuasive than base-rate statistical information (see review by Taylor and Thompson [6]). Although these results have often been attributed to the vividness of personal