The effects of student feedback to teachers : evidence from a field experiment

We conducted a field experiment to examine the effects of student feedback to teachers at a large Dutch school for intermediate vocational education. Students evaluated all teachers, but only a randomly selected group of teachers received feedback. Additionally, we asked all teachers before as well as after the experiment to assess their own performance on the same items. We find a precisely estimated zero average treatment effect of receiving feedback on student evaluation scores a year later. Only those teachers whose self-assessment before the experiment is much more positive than their students' evaluations improve significantly in response to receiving feedback. We also find that provision of feedback reduces the gap between teachers' self-assessment and students' assessment, but only to a limited extent. All of these results are driven by the female teachers in our sample; male teachers turn out to be unresponsive to student feedback.