Abstract
The use of student ratings to measure instructors’ teaching performance and effectiveness in tertiary education has been an important but controversial tool in the improvement of teaching quality during the past few decades. This is an attempt to explore non-instructional factors of student evaluations by discussing and reviewing relevant literature with regard to the most common non-instructional factors in student ratings. Moreover, semi-structured interviews were used with 14 college instructors. The findings show that most of the teachers support the use of student evaluations as a means of quality control and teaching improvement. However, the great majority of teachers expressed their concerns about the non-instructional factors which affect student ratings and make them meaningless. They reported that gender, time of evaluation, expected grades, nationality of the instructor, and other factors can affect student ratings. The study proposes some recommendations which might make student evaluation practices more useful and informative.
Highlights
Background of the StudyThe use of student ratings to measure instructors’ teaching performance and effectiveness has been an important but controversial tool in the improvement of teaching quality during the past few decades (Spooren et al, 2007)
What are the non-instructional factors in student evaluations of their teachers?
The interviews included the following questions: Do you support the idea of using student evaluation forms to evaluate teaching effectiveness? If yes or no, why? In your opinion, what are the non-instructional factors that affect student evaluations of their teachers? How could student evaluations be improved to meet instructional needs and improve teaching practices? The data were analysed using themes that emerged from the interviews to answer the study questions
Summary
The use of student ratings to measure instructors’ teaching performance and effectiveness has been an important but controversial tool in the improvement of teaching quality during the past few decades (Spooren et al, 2007). If student evaluations can be increased by giving higher grades, they are a flawed instrument for evaluating teaching. D’Apollonia and Abrami (1997, cited in Germain & Scanduran, n.d) claim that student evaluations are unsophisticated and provide little insight for teaching improvement; they are, in their view, only crude judgements of instructional effectiveness. All these are considered to be disadvantages of student evaluations aside from their impact on grade inflation. If the purpose of student evaluations is to improve and reward the quality of teaching, it is important for higher education institutions to develop a www.ccsenet.org/hes. This paper is an attempt to explore and identify these non-instructional factors according to teachers’ perspectives, and to discover some possible ways of eliminating these factors and improving current student evaluations and evaluation practices
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