Instructional explanations are an ubiquitous component of classroom instruction, but are relatively neglected in science education when compared to other facets of teaching and learning. The ubiquity of instructional explanations and their potential to stimulate learning in students suggests that they should garner more attention from science…

Peer review is a powerful method to enhance teaching in higher education. Peers, however, may not be the most relevant people in evaluating teaching success; as the most important stakeholders in learning, students' evaluations need to be heard. Whilst some efforts to capture "the student voice" are simplistic and may foster consumerist…

RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is becoming an increasingly popular tool among students, faculty and school administrators. The validity of RMP is a point of debate; many would argue that self-selection bias obscures the usefulness of RMP evaluations. In order to test this possibility, we collected three types of evaluations: RMP evaluations that…

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) play a central role in modern academia. They are used for tenure, promotion, teaching improvement and other important decisions. One would think that the data collected from a SET would be analysed correctly, but such is typically not the case, as can be seen in this study later. Therefore we propose a…

The present study investigated differences in the effectiveness of instructors from a variety of departments who taught the same course in both intensive and traditional formats within the same year, while controlling for many confounding variables. Results indicated that intensive courses did not significantly differ from traditional courses in…

All tertiary institutions in Australia use the same Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ); however, for the internal evaluation of teaching they use their own surveys. This paper performs an analysis of the internal Quality of Teaching Surveys (QTS) used in Australian universities. We classify the questions within the QTS surveys. This…

Evaluation of teaching effectiveness is considered a critical element in determining whether or not faculty members are retained at higher education institutions; academic milestones such as tenure and promotion often require documentation of the quality of faculty teaching. As methods of assessing teaching effectiveness evolve, concerns about the…

The Community of Inquiry framework has become a useful instrument for exploring learning in online classes; however, the interactions between the constructs of teaching presence and cognitive presence remain relatively unexplored. This study investigated student perceptions of cognitive presence as explained by three teaching presence elements;…

Student evaluation of instruction in college and university courses has been a routine and mandatory part of undergraduate and graduate education for some time. A major shortcoming of the process is that it relies exclusively on the opinions or qualitative judgments of students rather than on assessing the learning or transfer of knowledge that…

This paper discusses the relative advantage offered by online Students' Evaluations of Teaching (SET) and describes a study conducted at a Canadian university to identify critical success factors of online evaluations from students' point of view. Factors identified as important by the students include anonymity, ease of use (of both SET survey…

One of the primary means of evaluating teaching effectiveness in higher education is through the use of end-of-term student ratings of teacher performance. A number of universities have begun experimenting with replacing the traditional paper and pencil rating forms with on-line forms. Because student ratings often play a key role in personnel…

Student faculty ratings are used at most institutions of higher learning for three important reasons. First, the ratings provide direct feedback to the faculty, and this enables faculty to adjust their teaching styles. Second, the ratings provide the administration with information intended to assist in guiding and mentoring faculty toward more…

A detailed comparison of the information concerning teacher performance generated by the questionnaires and discussion did not substantiate the common assumption that free discussion would raise more issues and suggestions for teaching improvement, but teachers preferred the discussion method. (MSE)

While student evaluations of teaching performance can provide useful feedback on faculty, particularly on dimensions of course delivery, there are serious limitations. Bias and distrust are often overlooked in interpreting student ratings. An inappropriate use is in rank-ordering faculty in a department. Student evaluation data must be integrated…

Campbell and Fiske (1959) developed four criteria of construct validity when measures of more than one trait are obtained with more than one method. In this study these criteria are compared with two other procedures--an analysis of variance (ANOVA) model and confirmatory factor analysis--for analyzing multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) data. The…