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The Real Issue of Performance Evaluation

March 2007

Tony Milanowski

When offering professional development services to teachers it may be more important to provide quality developmental assistance than to separate the summative (salary-related) evaluation from developmental (formative) evaluation.

Some have argued that splitting these two parts of teacher evaluation would help those evaluated to feel less defensive, more open to discussing performance problems, and more open to taking suggestions. The evaluator, in turn, would be free to help the teacher improve performance without also having to make a salary-sensitive administrative evaluation.

But according to a recent study by WCER researcher Tony Milanowski and colleagues, it doesn’t always happen this way. In fact, their recent study found no major differences between two groups of new teachers—one evaluated in separate evaluation manner, and the other evaluated in combined manner—in terms of their openness to discussion of difficulties, their reception and acceptance of performance feedback, their stress, turnover, or performance improvement.

One group of teachers in the study received both summative evaluation and formative mentoring from a single person. Teachers in the other group received evaluation and mentoring from different people. Researchers found little support for the argument that a formative-only evaluator provides more useful assistance toward improving performance: Teacher performance observation ratings over time did not show a greater performance gain for the separate-evaluations group. Nor did separating the evaluations appear to lessen teacher stress or the rate of teacher turnover.

Whether or not to separate the evaluation roles is not the real issue. What’s really important is the quality of developmental assistance, the credibility and accessibility of the mentor or mentor-evaluator, and the personal compatibility of the evaluator and evaluatee. Results from teacher interview and surveys suggest that many of these factors were present in relatively equal amounts in each group.

Milanowski explains that whichever approach is taken, organizations need to ensure that developmental evaluation and assistance actually happen. In this study, not all of the employees in either group actually received the level of developmental assistance program designers intended.

Interviews with evaluatees suggested some reasons why reactions to the summative evaluations were more negative in the split role group. First, many teachers in the split-role group perceived a lack of communication with the summative evaluator. In an attempt to make the separation real and keep the workload of the summative evaluators within bounds, these evaluators were instructed not to give extensive developmental feedback or coaching. But many in the split-role group said it was unfair to be assessed without being given any developmental assistance. Some resented the teacher evaluators, describing them as cold, clinical, and uncaring.

Second, separating roles between evaluators raises a risk of disassociating mentoring activities from the performance standards used for summative evaluation. Third, separating roles may lead to more negative reactions to the summative evaluation process. In this study, reactions to the summative evaluation process were more negative in the split-role group.

Milanowski says a limitation of this study is the non-random assignment of teachers to the groups. It is possible that the groups were not equivalent on pre-existing differences in characteristics that may have influenced reactions to the different programs, such as ability, self-efficacy, openness to coaching, or feedback orientation. A second limitation concerns the generalizability of the results beyond new teachers. New teachers may be more open to feedback and more motivated to use it than their experiences colleagues. The new teachers in this study may also have been less threatened by summative evaluation, because as beginners they may have believed that they were not expected to perform perfectly.

Funding for CPRE research in teacher compensation and school finance is provided by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the Carnegie Corporation, and private donors.

Adapted from the paper, “Split Roles in Performance Evaluation: A Field Study Involving New Teachers.”