During the spring and summer semesters of 2020, The College of Education and Human Ecology piloted the Student Evaluation of Inclusive Classroom Instruction (SEI_CI) for undergraduate and graduate students with declared majors in EHE. For the pilot survey, graduating students provided anonymous feedback about their overall experiences with cultural inclusion in their EHE courses. The response rate was 20-30%.
The SEI_CI was developed as one part of the EHE commitment to institutionalizing equity, diversity, and inclusion. There is a great need to promote sensitive, responsive engagement of diverse students, and to have a system for students to evaluate their instructors’ inclusive classroom practices, which is essential for developing new policies and practices to address institutional racism in higher education. EHE is working to ensure the cultural competence of instructors, who must demonstrate that they (a) have acquired the knowledge and skills to develop a culturally sensitive curriculum representative of diverse cultural lenses; and (b) are responsive and sensitive to students’ individual needs and cultural differences.
2020 Pilot Data Summary
7-item Scale Questions
89.4% Strongly/Somewhat agree their EHE instructors used culturally diverse examples in their courses.
69.9% Strongly/Somewhat Disagree their EHE instructors privileged students from their own cultures over students from other cultures.
92.9% Strongly/Somewhat agreed their EHE instructors held high expectations for students regardless of their cultural background.
44.3% Strongly/Somewhat agreed their EHE instructors facilitated disagreements that occurred in their courses between students from different cultures.
69.9% Strongly/Somewhat disagreed conflicts/disagreements occurred in their EHE courses between instructors from different cultures.
81.4% Strongly/Somewhat agreed their instructors valued cultural commonalities and differences among students in their EHE courses.
92% Strongly/Somewhat agreed their EHE instructors respected their cultural background.
Survey Distribution
The SEI_CI has seven core questions with five supplementary questions, and will be distributed during the same period as the OSU SEI at the end of each academic semesters. An email invitation with a Qualtrics Survey link will be sent to all undergraduate/graduate students with majors in EHE. The SEI_CI is already IRB approved (#2020B0231). Students will be invited to participate in a focus group during summer 2021, immediately following the SEI_CI spring assessment. The invitation will be included on the SEI_CI, in which students can provide their contact not connected to their response. Survey data will be re-examined based on the information provide by students in the focus groups, and edits to the SEI_CI will be made prior to survey dissemination the following semesters.
Anticipated Benefits
Data obtained from the SEI_CI will be placed in a data repository and continually updated after each survey period, so that EHE faculty and staff can have access and use of the data for quality improvement, and to evaluate specific EHE policies and practices in the areas of teaching inclusion and cultural competence have an effect on students’ evaluations. Long-term data obtained from the SEI_CI will be used to identify policies and practices that need to be changed and/or developed at OSU and within EHE to begin to eliminate institutional racism experienced by students. This proposal will situate OSU and EHE as leaders in the assessment of inclusive and culturally responsive instruction.
