Student evaluation based indicators of teaching excellence from a highly selective liberal arts college

Abstract

The paper uses individual level data from each student that has enrolled in each class in the department in the last five years. Unlike several past studies that lack data on teaching quality measures Ordered Probit models reveal that the significant determinants of effective teaching, based on student evaluations of teaching (SET) are: organization, clarity of exposition, availability and enthusiasm of the instructor. The gender and race of the instructor is significant with female and non-white instructors being downgraded by students. The usual findings of expected grades inflating teaching evaluations are contested by the empirical evidence from this paper.Highly selective liberal arts colleges claim to provide a better education based on smaller class sizes and excellent teachers that are also active scholars. The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of effective teaching in Economics and Business, according to student evaluations of teaching (SET) at one such college. The paper will begin with a literature review of the scholarship on teaching evaluations. The next section will describe the dataset and the models used to examine teaching effectiveness. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the econometric results.