What if the following are BOTH true for a particular course at the same time?
A. Some kind of learning outcomes assessment conducted on all students who just completed the course clearly demonstrates superior student learning when compared with similar assessments of similar courses.
AND
B. Some kind of student ratings collected for the same course clearly demonstrate that the students are more dissatisfied with this course than with similar courses.
Or vice versa.
For an annotated, linked table of contents to an ongoing discussion of this topic – which emerged from The TLT Group’s most recent online workshop about Student Course Evaluations/Ratings/Assessments, see:
http://www.tltgroup.org/studentcourseeval/BusTestvOtherTest.htm
Which offers links to the blog where you can read others’ thoughtful, edited responses and add your own comments, etc..
If this situation were to occur at all, it would be an anomaly. There is no substantial evidence to support this as a systematic phenomenon. Of course, you'd have to define what "learn better" means and have an appropriate system for evaluation as well. While there is regular anecdotal evidence that students sometimes resist instructional innovations, even those that have been shown to be effective, that resistance is almost always at the outset, when the process is new and perhaps not as well organized of smoothly operating as it should be. The same anecdotal evidence suggests that as the teacher's skill in managing the method increases, resistance goes down.
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