Feedback can be powerful, but its effects are dependent on what students do. There has been intensive research in recent years under the banner of 'feedback literacy' to understand how to help students make the most of feedback. Although there are instruments to measure feedback literacy, they largely measure perceptions and orientations rather…

Procrastination in academic activities is common amongst university students, and has negative consequences for their personal as well as academic development. As a result, there is a need for valid -- yet at the same time brief and clear-cut -- measurement tools that enable the specific procrastinating behaviour of university students to be…

Peer feedback activities are characterized by peers performing both roles of feedback provider and receiver, and peers are found to benefit from both roles. However, in current feedback literacy studies, the emphasis has been overwhelmingly given to students' understandings, capacities and dispositions in receiving feedback, and existing student…

Despite its name, the halo effect in student evaluation of teaching (SET) response is not mystical. Halo in SET results from psychological processes that undermine SET validity, particularly for summative evaluation (pay decisions, etc.). These processes span psychological concepts of cognition, motivation and affect. This paper demonstrates that…

Although the importance of investigating student feedback literacy has been widely argued in the literature, a measurement instrument is still lacking. In this study, a student feedback literacy scale was developed and validated. The scale consists of six dimensions (eliciting, processing, enacting, appreciation, readiness and commitment). Five…

Intensive research attention has focused on developing students' evaluative judgement within the higher education curriculum, but little has addressed how it can be measured. The contextual nature of evaluative judgement makes it difficult to generate an encompassing instrument, highlighting the need for situated measurement tools. Against this…

Scholarly debate about student evaluations of teaching (SETs) often focuses on whether SETs are valid, reliable and unbiased. In this article, we assume the most optimistic conditions for SETs that are supported by the empirical literature. Specifically, we assume that SETs are moderately correlated with teaching quality (student learning and…

This study uses decision tree analysis to determine the most important variables that predict high overall teaching and course scores on a student evaluation of teaching (SET) instrument at a large public research university in the United States. Decision tree analysis is a more robust and intuitive approach for analysing and interpreting SET…

To advance the discussion on the validity of student evaluations of university teaching, student ratings of two teaching dimensions -- student involvement and rapport -- were compared with corresponding observer ratings. Seven potential bias variables were tested with regard to their impact on the students' teaching assessment: three teacher…

Peer assessment in higher education has been studied for decades. Despite the substantial amount of research carried out, peer assessment has yet to make significant advances. This review identifies themes of recent research and highlights the challenges that have hampered its advance. Most of these challenges arise from the manual nature of peer…

We present an equation, derived from standard statistical theory, that can be used to estimate sampling margin of error for student evaluations of teaching (SETs). We use the equation to examine the effect of sample size, response rates and sample variability on the estimated sampling margin of error, and present results in four tables that allow…

This research looks closely at claims that ratemyprofessors.com creates a valid measure of teaching effectiveness because student responses are consistent with a learning model. While some evidence for this contention was found in three datasets taken from the site, the majority of the evidence indicates that the instrument is biassed by a halo…

There is a plethora of research on student evaluations of teaching (SETs) regarding their validity, susceptibility to bias, practical use and effective implementation. Given that there is not one study summarising all these domains of research, a comprehensive overview of SETs was conducted by combining all prior meta-analyses related to SETs.…

In this study, the purpose was to develop a student engagement scale for higher education. The participants were 805 students. In the process of developing the item pool regarding the scale, related literature was examined in detail and interviews were held. Six factors--valuing, sense of belonging, cognitive engagement, peer relationships…

The aim of the present study was to develop and provide psychometric evidence in support of the groupwork skills questionnaire (GSQ) for measuring task and interpersonal groupwork skills. A 46-item version of the GSQ was initially completed by 672 university students. The number of items was reduced to 15 following exploratory factor analyses, and…