Student Evaluations Of Teaching Quality Research Articles

Using student evaluations to improve individual and department teaching qualities

Student evaluations can be seen as an opportunity for students to vent their views on the quality of teaching that they receive, and sometimes instructors trivialise the importance of this opportunity for dialogue with students and colleagues and reflection on teaching practice. This paper takes student evaluations of teaching quality seriously and proposes a new theoretical framework that enables greater utilisation of such information. We illustrate how information from evaluations can be used to identify areas where the whole department has strengths and weaknesses and where individual instructors perform relative to their own department. This information can be used to identify individuals with specific areas of expertise and shape best practice within departments, across departments and/or across institutions. It can also be used to highlight individuals who may require further professional development and reveal areas of mediocrity that are at risk of intervention from a higher level. Finally, it suggests ways to implement shared best practice in order to improve department teaching quality assessment results and individual teaching performance.

Professors’ Beauty, Ability, and Teaching Evaluations in Italy

Abstract Using data from an Italian University, we relate student evaluations of teaching quality to the physical attractiveness of instructors (as evaluated by external raters using photos), controlling for a number of teacher and course characteristics. We first show that teachers’ beauty significantly affects evaluations of their teaching. We carry out a number of checks to tackle threats to internal validity: course fixed effects and individual research productivity are controlled for; an IV estimation strategy is undertaken using a second measure of beauty as an instrument; and measures of grooming and fastidiousness are introduced. Notwithstanding these controls, we find that more attractive teachers receive much better evaluations.

Student evaluation of teaching quality in higher education: development of an instrument based on 10 Likert‐scales

Students' evaluation of teaching skills has been an important yet controversial tool in the improvement of teaching quality during the last few decades. When searching for an apt student questionnaire to measure instructional skills, it appeared that most existing questionnaires the authors were able to collect are based on a single‐item type of evaluation. Additionally, most of these instruments lack a theoretical foundation and hardly any instrument was tested with modern tests for reliability and validity. The authors managed to create a 31‐item instrument which comprises 10 Likert scales and is based on both the educational theory and empirical data. In this article, they present the different steps in constructing the instrument and discuss its reliability and validity. The results of this study underline the value of the use of a scaling technique in students' evaluation of teacher performance.

Medical student evaluation of teaching quality between obstetrics and gynecology residents and faculty as clinical preceptors in ambulatory gynecology

This study was undertaken to compare teaching quality between obstetrics/gynecology resident and faculty preceptors in ambulatory gynecology as determined by medical student evaluation. A prospective assessment of medical student evaluations of resident and faculty preceptors in ambulatory gynecology was conducted at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Forty-eight third-year medical students evaluated preceptors on 15 teaching quality items and recorded their clinical experience during their obstetrics/gynecology clerkship from July 2004 to June 2005 for a total of 138 evaluations. Faculty scores were statistically higher than resident scores on 4 of the 15 teaching quality items; acting as an appropriate clinical role model, emphasizing evidence-based learning, being enthusiastic about teaching and patient care (P < .05). Students performed significantly more Papanicolaou tests and pelvic and breast examinations during ambulatory sessions with residents than with faculty (P < .001). Residents and faculty contribute important and different aspects of teaching experiences for medical students in ambulatory gynecology.

Student Evaluation Of Teacher Performance: Random Pre-Destination

The student evaluation, used to measure students’ perceptions of teacher performance, has been increasingly used as the predominant component in assessing teaching effectiveness (Waters et al. 1988), and the widespread movement of outcomes assessment across the country makes this trend likely to continue in the future (McCoy et al. 1994, AACSB 1994, SACS 1995). Substantial research has been conducted with regard to the reliability and accuracy of student evaluation of teaching quality, and a considerable number of uncontrollable factors are found to bias the results of the evaluation rating. This paper identifies one more factor. Each student has an “evaluator profile”, which decreases the reliability of the student evaluation. An “evaluator profile” is a persistent pattern of evaluating behavior that may or may not be consistent with the quality of the characteristic being evaluated. Each class of students consists of a random sample of different evaluator profiles. A student evaluation rating of a teacher’s performance is biased up or down depending on the concentration of high or low evaluator profiles present. This paper further shows through simulation the degree to which student “evaluator profiles” impact the overall student evaluation rating of teacher performance. We find that there is evidence to support the “evaluator profile” conjecture, and that these “evaluator profiles” do in fact have the potential to change overall student evaluation ratings substantially.