Quality Of Teaching In Higher Education Research Articles

Making learning visible: the role of concept mapping in higher education

This article develops the concept‐mapping method as a tool for enhancing teaching quality in higher education. In particular, it describes how concept mapping can be used to transform abstract knowledge and understanding into concrete visual representations that are amenable to comparison and measurement. The article describes four important uses of the method: the identification of prior knowledge (and prior‐knowledge structure) among students; the presentation of new material in ways that facilitate meaningful learning; the sharing of ‘expert’ knowledge and understanding among teachers and learners; and the documentation of knowledge change to show integration of student prior knowledge and teaching. The authors discuss the implications of their approach in the broader context of university level teaching. It is not suggested that university teachers should abandon any of their tried and tested methods of teaching, but it is shown how the quality of what they do can be significantly enhanced by the use of concept mapping.

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.

The Politics of Teacher Education in the New Millennium: Implications for Special Education Teacher Educators

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates a 'highly qualified' teacher for every child in a Title I school by 2005–06. teacher education has become a 'front burner' political issue in Washington and statehouses across the U.S. Debates have arisen regarding how 'highly qualified' should be defined, and what type of teacher education is needed, or if any is needed, to ensure a highly qualified workforce. This article describes the positions of those who propose that teacher education be deregulated, and those who support the professionalization of teaching and teacher education. What we know from available evidence about the characteristics of high quality teacher education programs is then addressed. The paper concludes with a review of the implications of the current political climate for teacher education and special education and possible directions for future research that is needed to influence policy decisions.

Student Learning: Education's Field of Dreams

The focus of teacher education has been on teachers and teaching rather than on students and learning. Ms. Blackwell urges schools of education to shift their emphasis to the knowledge base about student learning, and she provides seven benchmarks for programs that will produce high- quality teachers who understand how students learn. AFTER A SEMESTER of delving into research on teaching, learning, and teacher preparation, the doctoral students in educational leadership at my university concluded that teacher education is primarily about teachers and teaching. Teachers tell students what they need to know and how to learn it, a model practiced for so long that what teachers do is presumed to be common knowledge. Everyone knows what teaching is. We have experienced it through years in the classroom. Parents teach their children; adults teach other adults in church or in the workplace. Teaching occurs whenever people get together. We all teach, and we know what teachers do, so much so that many confidently believe that teachers need little preparation beyond content knowledge. Thinking about teaching in this way puts teacher education in distinct contrast with medical and legal education. The training for doctors and lawyers clearly covers a professional body of knowledge that is to be mastered before students are allowed to practice. The work of these professionals carries an image of exclusiveness: we presume they know something others do not know. However, no mystery is associated with teaching; we don't generally believe that teachers have knowledge others do not have. So we must ask the hard questions: Do schools of education teach what teachers must know? Does teacher education teach about student learning? Student learning remains an elusive field of dreams, and schools of education are at a turning point, facing an uncertain future. Just as the education system is not organized to ensure every student a high- quality teacher, neither is it organized to ensure that every prospective teacher studies in a high-quality teacher education program that results in high-quality student learning. To help sort out this conundrum, I consider the disconnect between teacher education and a knowledge base that should be the domain of professional teachers: research on student learning. The core of the teacher education curriculum should be a rigorous, research-based curriculum that asks teachers to understand how different students learn in different content areas, not just a once-over-lightly, disconnected course that is so often the only exposure preservice teachers get to how students learn. Below, I offer seven sets of questions derived from benchmarks for student learning that faculty members and students should ask about their teacher education programs. My argument for inverting the traditional relationship between learning and teaching rests on four points. First, the traditional model of teacher education has failed to achieve the level of quality desired and may be rejected in its entirety by policy makers or overwhelmed by approaches from outside the university system. Only a sweeping shift has the potential to keep that from happening. Second, the knowledge base about student learning is now solid enough to offer a foundation that can transform the preparation of teachers. This knowledge base is grounded in well-designed research across various disciplines. Third, there is no agreement about what the professional knowledge base about teaching should be, and the research on which we currently base much of what is taught in teacher education does not meet stringent standards.1 Fourth, state licensing systems are under attack and in jeopardy for not demonstrating conclusively that certified teachers are more effective than those not certified.2 Most state licensing standards are rooted in a reductionist view of teaching that pretty much translates effective teacher behaviors into discrete competencies for program approval and teacher licensing. …

Rewarding quality teaching in higher education: the evading dream?

Teaching, and specifically quality teaching, has for many centuries been the defining characteristic of the academic profession. However, since the dawning of the 20th century, it seems that the very basis of the global higher education institutional reward system is the belief that working with, contributing to, and pursuing knowledge (ie research) is in fact superior to teaching. The article discloses some findings, based upon a global e-mail survey, involving more than 20 higher education institutions, practices that are being implemented in order to reward quality teaching. The survey indicated that there is in fact a disequilibrium between teaching and research, with the weight favourably tilted towards the latter. But, it seems as if the rewarding/recognition of quality teaching is slowly but surely catching on. Higher education institutions are increasingly implementing formal reward systems, which makes quality teaching much more than purely an evading dream. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.16(2) 2002: 32-40

Quality Assessment and the Tension between Teaching and Research

In 1992, the United Kingdom government introduced a formal system for the assessment of teaching quality in higher education, the Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA). One of the key aims of the TQA was to encourage continuous quality improvement in teaching and learning. This study analyses the experiences of senior staff, responsible for the management and development of quality in teaching and learning, and explores the perceived impact of the TQA, on the value and esteem of teaching. Utilising semi-structured interviews, conducted with senior academic personnel of the 13 Scottish universities, it was noted that senior management perceived difficulties in making judgements about the teaching aspect of academic work and were reluctant to promote staff on the basis of teaching performance. The respondents' statements further indicated that this reluctance was compounded by the continuing tension between teaching and research, in which research-based criteria took precedence over other matters. These findings are in line with previous research in the United States and Australia, which has suggested that the prioritisation of research may have created disincentives to the development of innovative teaching and learning processes. The TQA, in the United Kingdom, has fallen short of its goal of raising the profile of teaching, as an activity in higher education, primarily because competing demands for research output have taken precedence over attempts to improve teaching.

Calidad del profesor y los procesos académicos: reflexiones en torno a la formación del profesorado universitario y la calidad de la enseñanza.

This paper offers an interesting reflection on the link between the quality of higher education academicians, their training and the academic processes associated to student learning. The author presents unresolved dualities and trends that somehow lead us to think on the need to acknowledge and become more aware of the importance of learning over and above teaching. The study emphasizes the importance of developing stable levels of awareness to improve the management of the academician's own academic resources. Apparently, students are somehow better prepared than teachers think to assess teacher quality in the class-room Perhaps the key lies in achieving consistency between what we are seeking for ourselves in terms of higher education teaching quality and the quality of learning achieved by our students.

A Personal Response to those Who Bash Teacher Education

To each of a dozen common charges against formal programs of teacher education a personal response is made. Among other responses, it is argued that contextual knowledge of classrooms and schools is crucial for novice teachers; raw intelligence is insufficient for accomplished teaching; and as in other fields, accomplished performance will develop—if it ever develops—only over many years of effortful, deliberate practice. It is argued that programs of teacher education can offer the novice teacher the findings, concepts, principles, technologies, and theories from educational research that are relevant to teaching and learning, as they are provided to other professionals before they enter their fields of practice. It is concluded that high-quality teacher education programs are profoundly challenging, indispensable, inaugural components in the development of accomplished performance by teachers.

Quality in initial teacher education

Presents a critique of the assumptions underlying the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) strategy of defining quality centrally and imposing its view through a power‐coercive change process. An alternative view of effective teacher education is developed, based on the contention that high quality courses result from the thinking and commitment of teacher education professionals, working with their colleagues in schools, in local settings. It is argued that the development of high quality initial teacher training (ITE) results essentially from the engagement of teacher educators with ideas drawn from teacher education practice and research. Centrally‐driven curriculum blue‐prints are unlikely to lead to the same high quality results, rather they will tend to result in mere compliance. The argument is illustrated by an example of teacher education development in one institution leading to a set of propositions about the elements which characterise high quality teacher education more generally.

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Teacher Education's Odyssey

I have been reading the Odyssey, the great story of a journey home, and thinking about teacher education as being on a very rough journey. Those who claim the privilege of educating teachers are currently encountering trials that share similarities with those of Odysseus. The Charybdis of privatization of education threatens to drain resources from public schools; the Scylla of high-stakes testing looms over certification gates. Sirens of cynicism beckon parents, educators, and administrators to abandon hope for the public schools; politicians, like the Cyclops, see only simplistic answers to complex questions. Some faculty members have been eating lotus blossoms that induce stupor and forgetting about schools and the teachers and students who toil there; and university administrators, foundations, and federal agencies, like the Olympian gods, have awakened from a deep slumber and decided to determine the fate of teacher education. It is not yet clear how schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) will navigate the rough waters of teacher education reform, whether we will reach some place we can call home, or how we will be changed by our journey. John Goodlad is one who, over many years, has taken the bearings of teacher education, recommended a new tack when necessary, and talked about overhauls and trimming for many decades. He has lived through the changes in the faculty who call themselves teacher educators, and those who do not. He has worried about the congenital malaise of teacher education and the inhospitable surround within which faculty struggle to prepare teachers. While fully cognizant of the impact of the university rewards systems, resource allocation, low status of teacher education within universities, and the poor (in status and rewards) conditions that those who enter the profession of teaching face, Goodlad has kept an unfaltering gaze on those who prepare teachers and the forces that shape teacher preparation. When almost 60% of prospective teachers failed the first administration of the state-mandated initial teacher test in Massachusetts, the syndicated columnist, William Raspberry (Laitsch, 1998) called it the Massachusetts embarrassment. The Massachusetts Educator Certification Test (MECT) is the result of Massachusetts 1993 Education Reform Act and a bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature that required candidates for teacher certification to pass a standardized exam in his or her subject field [and] a standardized exam of communication and language skill (Haney, Fowler, Wheelock, Bebell, & Malec, 1999). The test itself has come under heavy scrutiny, and the reliability and validity of the test as of July 1999 have not been demonstrated through published test statistics or common psychometric information. Educators (e.g., Haney et al., 1999), Massachusetts legislators, (e.g., Lane, 1999) and private citizen groups (e.g., Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, 1999) have called for an independent audit of the test. Nevertheless, the volume and vehemence of the teacher and teacher educator bashing rhetoric in Massachusetts caught the country's attention and made national news. The Commonwealth's Speaker of the House called teachers idiots (Laitsch, 1998). The then-acting governor called for testing all the teachers in the state, saying he would fire anyone who could not pass the test (he won the election), and the flamboyant John Silber, chancellor of Boston University and chairman of the State Board of Education, called education courses mindless (Lively, 1998, p. A28) and threatened to close his own school of education if 90% of its graduates did not pass the test. Another reason the Massachusetts test received national attention is that many states are struggling to improve educational standards, and testing figures prominently in most reform efforts. Ten years ago Goodlad (1991) wrote, State-mandated teacher education curriculums should be completely removed in favor of entry examinations designed to fulfill each state's responsibility for protecting the public against incompetent teachers and assessments to ensure that all the conditions necessary for high-quality teacher education are in place (p. …

“NCATE: Is “Lowering the Standards the Way to Go?”

While NCATE asserts that its major purpose is the identification and accreditation of high quality teacher education programs, support for NCATE among teacher educators is limited. In this article, NCATE's intent of accrediting only high quality programming is argued to be overly grandiose. Instead, NCATE should focus on identifying weak programs. Conceptual and practical arguments are presented in support of this minimalist mission for NCATE. Consensus (the basis for standard setting) is much more compatible with a minimalist approach to accreditation than with an approach aimed at a particular conception of high quality. In addition, the protection of the public's interest in teaching and teacher education is more appropriately viewed as protection from incompetence than as a guarantee of high quality. In a more practical sense, NCATE already operates in a minimalist way in that few programs are denied accreditation, and those teacher educators seeking fundamental programmatic reform typically are neither motivated nor guided by NCATE standards. Suggestions are given for moving NCATE toward a more minimalist mission.

Lived experiences and reflections of joint NCATE‐state reviews

Teacher education faculty members, state certification officers, and NCATE staff share what they have learned from their NCATE‐state joint review and accreditation visits. Dilemmas concerning the joint review are addressed and include (a) proactive versus reactive measures for institutions of higher education and state affiliations of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, (b) issues of partnership versus separateness, and (c) process versus product frameworks in planning and documenting growth. Conceptual and practical suggestions are offered for working collaboratively to develop high quality teacher education programs and successful joint review and accreditation visits.

Building a Metacognitive Model of Reflection.

An increased value is being placed on quality teaching in higher education. An important step in developing approaches to better instruction is understanding how those who are successful go about improving their teaching. Thus, several years ago we undertook a program of research in which the concept of "reflection" provided the frame of reference. We envisaged reflection as a process of formative evaluation, and also saw links between reflec- tion and metacognition. What we have documented and analyzed in detail are the reflective processes of six university professors in their day-to-day planning, instructing and evaluating of learners. The result is a metacognitive model and coding scheme that operationalize the process of reflection. Both provide a language for describing reflection and therefore a way to think about how to improve teaching. In this paper, we describe the research and the model and the contributions they make to our understanding of teacher thinking in higher education.

Defining Quality Teaching in Higher Education: an Australian perspective

In Australia, in this decade, quality teaching in higher education has become a strongly politicised issue. My research deals with some of the discourses which have been used to define ‘quality teaching’ in documents and practices at the national site; from one University; and from extensive discussions with academics who are acknowledged as ‘good teachers’ within that University. Using critical post‐modernism and critical discourse analysis, I examined this material, searching for underlying value assumptions, current meanings, and contestations, spaces and omissions. My findings suggest that whilst there are a wide variety of definitions of quality, few address the complexity of teaching. Statements, particularly from the national and institutional sites call on and contribute to management discourses, whilst omitting connections between teaching, the teacher or student learning. These current discourses can be interpreted as either problems for academics, or opportunities to participate in the construction of new meanings of ‘quality teaching’.

Turmoil in Success

Sketches a number of issues implicated in the assessment of teaching quality in higher education. Argues that checklist approaches to measuring teaching quality have some limited value – and a more professional, developmental approach is preferred. However, the focus on teaching quality should not disguise the fact that the emphasis needs to be on enhancing the quality of student learning, and this is not simply a function of the quality of the teaching which they encounter. Discusses implications both for academic departments and for universities, the claim being that systemic action is necessary.

A performance indicator of teaching quality in higher education: The Course Experience Questionnaire

ABSTRACT Performance indicators (PIs) in higher education have focused chiefly on research outputs. They have largely ignored the teaching function of universities and colleges. This article outlines the development of a student evaluation instrument designed to measure the teaching performance of academic organisational units. The theory of teaching and learning that underlies the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is described. The instrument's statistical qualities and its ability to discriminate intelligibly between different courses are discussed in the context of results from national trials in Australian higher education. The principal conclusion reached is that the CEQ offers a reliable, verifiable and useful means of determining the perceived teaching quality of academic units in systems of higher education that are based on British models. Several technical and political issues remain unresolved in its application as a PI.