Does evaluation of teaching lead to improvement of teaching?

Abstract

Given the widespread use of student evaluation of teaching in North American colleges and universities, it is reasonable to ask whether student evaluation has accomplished one of its major intended outcomes, namely improvement of instructional quality. A review of research evidence from three independent sources (faculty surveys, field experiments and longitudinal comparisons) suggests that student evaluation does in fact contribute significantly to improvement of certain aspects of university teaching, particularly if evaluation is supplemented by expert consultation. Furthermore, there is no clear evidence that student evaluation has led to undesirable instructional side‐effects, such as grade inflation and entrenchment of traditional teaching methods.     

An application of importance-performance analysis to students’ evaluation of teaching

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - Students’ feedback is usually gathered in institutions of higher education to evaluate the teaching quality from the students’...     

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In the field of EFL, effective language evaluation is receiving more and more attention. However, in many Chinese EFL situations, the evaluation of language development is still considered to be product-oriented. It is the purpose of this article to examine an evaluation system of an English language program offered by a university in Yunnan Province of China to identify the existing problems and any points which do not conform to the current view of effective language evaluation. For the sake of possible improvements in assessment/evaluation, a method/technique of using portfolios that is not at present used in this program for evaluation/assessment is proposed, and the rationale of introducing this method is discussed.     

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Students’ evaluations of teaching are increasingly used by universities to evaluate teaching performance. However, these evaluations are controversial mainly due to fact that students value various aspects of excellent teaching differently. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new approach to students’ evaluations of university teaching based on data from conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is a multivariate technique used to analyze the structure of individuals’ preference. In particular, our approach accounts for different importance students attach to various aspects of teaching. Moreover, it accounts explicitly for heterogeneity arising from students’ preferences, and incorporates it to form comprehensive teaching evaluation score. We have conducted survey and confirmed applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach.     

Correction to: An application of importance-performance analysis to students’ evaluation of teaching

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability -     

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