Evidence of Effectiveness in Teaching
Oscar Mendez
Department of Economics, University of California at Davis
http://economics.ucdavis.edu/people/omendez
Teaching at the Department of Economics
One of the activities that I enjoy the most from my line of work is teaching. Over the last
five years in the Ph.D. program I have worked as a teaching assistant (TA) for five
courses in economics. My role in these courses was to hold discussion sections two to
four times a week, hold two office hours per week, grade exams and homeworks, and,
conditional on demand, hold extra sections/office hours before important tests. A
discussion section consists of review and reinforcement, through exercises and examples,
of the material covered in class.
At the end of each quarter, students are asked to evaluate their TA on a scale from 1-5,
where 5 represents "Strongly Agree" and 1 represents "Strongly Disagree". The Student
Evaluation Score is the average score received by the TA in response to the statement
"Overall, the TA did a good job in this course." I present below my ‘TA Evaluations’ for
the five courses I worked as a TA for, comparing them with the departmental “TA
Evaluation” average for the respective school period (a departmental average was not
provided for Summer 2012. In this case I made a linear interpolation to complete the
sketch).
Teaching Assistant Evaluations by UC Davis Students 5 4.8 4.6 4.15 4.23 4.7 4.7 4.47 4.4 4.4 4.2 4.8 4.7 4.27 Average TA Evaluation TA Evaluation for Oscar 4 3.8 Winter 2010 Winter Spring 2012 Summer Spring 2014 2011 2012 Please visit my website (oscarmendezm.weebly.com) to see detailed information on
student evaluations, including unedited student comments on my aptitudes and method,
for the five courses I taught at the Economics Department.
Teaching at the Department of Spanish
Between 2011 and 2013 I worked 4 quarters as Associate Instructor (AI) of Spanish at
the UC Davis Department of Spanish. As preparation, I coursed a one-quarter-long class
aimed at teaching me methods, theories, and approaches on both teaching in general and
teaching a second language (SPA390). My role as an Associate Instructor consisted on
being a full on Spanish teacher. I was assigned a class of 25-28 students, a syllabus, and a
Spanish book (Dos Mundos), and then I used the methods I learned in the SPA390 class
to teach introductory Spanish to UC Davis undergraduate students. My activities
consisted in teaching 1-hour-long classes from Monday to Friday; preparing theoretical
input and activities for practice; grading homeworks; holding two office hours per week;
creating midterms, an oral exam and a final exam; grading them; keeping track of
students’ assistance, participation, delivered homeworks, and all exams’ grades; and
giving a final grade.
As in the Economics Department, students at the Spanish Department are expected to
evaluate their AIs at the end of every quarter. Students are given forms to evaluate their
AI’s teaching method based on how well they performed a relevant set of desirable
teaching activities. At the end of these forms students are then asked to provide a
‘summary’ evaluation, stating whether the AI’s overall performance was (i) excellent, (ii)
very good, (iii) good, (iv) fair, or (v) poor. A rating is then created by giving 5 points to
an ‘excellent’ evaluation and 1 point to a ‘poor’ evaluation, dividing the points obtained
by the total amount of possible points, and then normalizing the score between 0 and 5. I
present below my AI score for the four Spanish courses I taught (no departmental average
evaluations are available for Spanish courses):
Associate Instructor Evaluations by UC Davis Students 5 4.8 5 4.91 4.79 4.79 4.6 4.4 AI Evaluation for Oscar 4.2 4 3.8 Fall 2011 Winter 2012 Fall 2012 Spring 2013 Additionally, our main supervisor visits our class once a quarter and evaluates different
aspects of our performance without providing a numeric measure. Please visit my website
for my supervisor’s detailed evaluation of my class for the quarters of Fall 2011, Winter
2012, and Fall 2012:
You can also find in my website detailed information on student evaluations, including
unedited student comments on my aptitudes and method, on the four courses I taught at
the Spanish Department.