About Me

This book presents a lifelong synthesis of an evaluator, survey researcher and data analyst who has specialized in student/human development. I do not use “social” media. Anyway, here’s an "about me" version of some of my history: 

At the Berkeley Student Cooperative, I was House Manager of Oxford Hall for 3.5 semesters in 1962-64. I got a bachelor’s in History in 1964. In the mid-1960s, I worked as a typist-editor-interviewer for a project on the “change and development of college students” at the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education at Berkeley. Having saved some money, I and my lady friend at the time went to Europe for a year in 1968-69. Living out of a bare-bones VW bus, we stayed in Hannover, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Malaga, Marrakesh, and Genoa. 

Subsequently, I worked on research for the above project, and then for a study of community-based encounter groups. And I was admitted to the Higher Education program at Berkeley, earning a master’s in Counseling Psychology first.

As a graduate student in the later 1970s to 1981, I studied the university itself, in part via a heavy involvement in student government—the Associated Students (ASUC) and the Graduate Assembly. I was a student representative for 5 years on 3 Academic Senate committees, and on a University-wide committee on planning and a task force on student participation in university governance. As “Academic Review Unit Coordinator” for the ASUC, I completed a set of survey-based student evaluations of their undergraduate major academic programs—which are in ERIC (e.g., “Engineering and Physical Science Programs at Berkeley: An Academic Review Using Comparative Student Evaluations”—and others like that in the Humanities, Life Sciences, and Social Sciences; & for Lower Division). Despite some Googling, I could find no record of having twice been one of the three finalists for the position of University of California Student Regent.

But Google can find my Ph.D. dissertation (1991, by Jeffrey Wynter Koon) and the book-length report for my master’s (Types, Traits, and Transitions: The Lives of Four-Year College Students). A 1995 article by Koon and Harry G. Murray is in the Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 66, No. 1 (“Using Multiple Outcomes to Validate Student Ratings of Overall Teaching Effectiveness”). 

Two of my paper presentations in the 1980s were printed in the proceedings of conferences on assessment and college student ratings of teachers. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, everything else overlapped with my being the lead childcare person and school-community involvement person in our family of four in St. Paul. I was active in every PTA, and District-level committees on topics such as curriculum, school/program evaluation, and the achievement gap. And I averaged at least one survey a year (design, analysis, report) of parents and/or students for one of my kids’ schools. 

From 2000 through 2012, I annually reported on the results of a survey of juniors (involving program ratings) done for Principal Mary Mackbee at Central High. There too, in 2003 and 2005, I demonstrated the validity of high school student ratings of their teachers. In 2007, I circulated my analysis of why NCLB was a poor law. And, for 2006-07, I voluntarily provided a multiple regression-based, value-added analysis of state test data in reading and math for St. Paul’s schools, grade levels 4-6. 

From 2012-2015, I volunteer-worked (with Ann Hobbie, parent representative on a state Dept. of Education “work group,” as my means of access and as collaborator) successfully to include student evaluations of teachers in Minnesota’s K-12 teacher evaluation model, and was then asked to serve on their Survey Design Team. 

Finally, over the course of 3 trips, I also spent another 5 months in Europe with my wife (with stays in London, Paris, Trier and Florence).