Student evaluations of teaching and courses: Student study strategies as a criterion of validity

Recent developments in higher education are likely to lead to increased evaluation of teaching and courses and, in particular, increased use of student evaluation of teaching and courses by questionnaire. Most studies of the validity of such evaluations have been conducted in terms of the relationship between traditional measures of how much students learn and their ratings of teaching and courses. But there have been few if any studies of the relationship between students' rating of teaching and the quality of student learning, or in how the students approached their learning.For the evaluation of teaching and courses by questionnaire to be valid we would expect that (1) those students reporting that they adopted deeper approaches to study would rate the teaching and the course more highly than those adopting more surface strategies and, more importantly, (2) those teachers and courses which received higher mean ratings would also have, on average, students adopting deeper strategies.In the paper we report the results for eleven courses in two institutions. The results, in general, support the validity of student ratings, and suggest that courses and teaching in which students have adopted deeper strategies to learning also have higher student ratings.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1989 Annual Conference of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australia.