A Psychometric Evaluation of Two Teaching Effectiveness Scales

Abstract

The call for teaching accountability in higher education initiated teaching effectiveness research and its scales development. Attention in many institutions of higher learning has been diverted recently to the improvement of teaching performance as another way besides academic research to promote the higher institutions. The diversity of attention is a response to external calls for accountability in teaching as a result of the under-estimation of the significance of the teaching process compared to research activities. As research on teaching effectiveness has increased, so has the number of different measures of teaching effectiveness. Hence, in this article, the researchers examined the psychometric properties of two teaching effectiveness scales, namely the Marsh Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (1987) and Mahfooz Ansari and Mustafa Achoui Ansari Teaching Feedback Survey (2000) in terms of their factorial and construct validity. A total of 1504 3rd and 4th year and postgraduate students were selected from four renowned Malaysian public Universities, namely USIM, UM, UPM and IIUM. The study found that although the two scales were constructed to assess teaching effectiveness in higher institutions, the Marsh scale was extensively used in the literature and more comprehensive in relation to the numbers of factors. The study found that although there is room for improvement for both scales, the Marsh’s scale is psychometrically more sound, and theoretically more comprehensive than Ansari and Ansari’s scale.