6 Conclusions
The Student Perceptions of Learning Experience proposed here is a short, focused instrument grounded in the peer-reviewed literature and aligned with the UFPP’s requirements. By renaming the instrument, centering it on the six aspects of class climate that students are qualified to report on, and adopting guardrails for the open-ended questions to mitigate documented equity bias, we can give students a meaningful voice in the evaluation of teaching while protecting both students and instructors from the well-documented biases of traditional teaching evaluations. This is an achievable reform — one that strengthens the integrity of the evaluation process and brings Cal Poly’s practices in line with a growing movement across higher education toward multidimensional, evidence-based evaluation of teaching (McCreary, 2026; Stark, 2026). Moreover, the instrument reflects Cal Poly’s distinctive pedagogical identity: at a university where students learn by doing, a survey centered on the climate in which that doing takes place is not just methodologically sound — it is institutionally apt.
In addition, two sub-committees of this Ad Hoc Committee prepared companion documents that are separate from this report. These documents have not been formally adopted by the full committee and are offered as companion resources for consideration by the respective Academic Senate committees to which they are addressed.
Guidance for Evaluation of Instruction — a proposed revision to UFPP §8.3 that organizes the evaluation of teaching around the seven TEval dimensions, includes a teaching effectiveness rubric adapted from the University of Kansas Benchmarks for Teaching Excellence, provides guidance on the appropriate and inappropriate uses of the survey data (including the inherent limitations of student evaluation data and the role of SPLE results within the broader evaluation framework), addresses department-associated questions, sets departmental expectations, and outlines training and implementation requirements. Offered for consideration by the Academic Senate Faculty Affairs Committee.
Formative Learning Feedback: A Companion to the Student Perceptions of Learning Experience Report — a voluntary, developmental feedback process to be tentatively offered through the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), organized around the seven research-based principles of learning identified by Ambrose et al. (2010), and designed to give instructors actionable information about how students are experiencing the learning environment while the course is still in progress. Offered for consideration by the Academic Senate Instruction Committee and the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology.