Research on student evaluation of college teachers' performance is briefly summarized. Lawrence M. Aleamoni offers four arguments in favor of student ratings: (1) students are the main source of information about the educational environment; (2) students are the most logical evaluators of student satisfaction and effectiveness of course elements;…

Student ratings of instruction are widely used as a basis for personnel decisions and faculty development recommendations. This digest discusses concerns about the validity of student ratings and presents a case for their use in teacher evaluation. There are several strong arguments for using student ratings to evaluate teachers. Students are in a…

Reviews a selection of the staff evaluation literature that appeared during the 1970s, covering problems in faculty evaluation; the student role; evaluation criteria, programs, and systems; and administrator evaluation. Includes a 47-item bibliography of ERIC documents and journal articles. (DMM)

Based on a longer report with the same title, this digest summarizes current efforts to increase the quality of college teaching. The report uses a model that views strategies for improving instruction as helping motivate individual faculty members to improve their teaching by actively changing (and maintaining) certain of their instructional…

Provides citations and abstracts for six documents from the ERIC junior colleges collection dealing with the evaluation of community college administrators and faculty. Specific topics covered in the documents cited include president evaluation, faculty evaluation systems, student evaluation of faculty, and the assessment of part-time faculty…

The public views teacher evaluation as a major problem in the school system today. State legislatures, aware of the concern, want to mandate more effective evaluation. Common methods for evaluating teachers have been ineffective, such as measurement tests of teacher characteristics, student achievement test scores, and rating of teachers'…

The amount of literature on program evaluation decreased in 1996, continuing a trend begun in the late 1980s. One exception to this is the literature on assessment. Another frequent issue is the technique of evaluation. Many examples of research on evaluation are from international settings, where accountability and evaluation appear to be…

Studies on the criterion validity of student evaluation-of-instruction instruments are analyzed, and recommendations are offered for future research into student evaluation of instruction. The main problem, and probably the reason for the lack of validity studies, is that it is difficult to agree on what the criteria of effective teaching should…

Recent research (1978-1982) on student evaluations of teaching is reviewed, including: influence of background variables pertaining to the student, the teacher, and the learning environment; the dimensions of the teaching being evaluated; the validity of students' evaluations; the "Doctor Fox" effect and its implications for validity; the…

The articles in this collection focus on processes for evaluating community college faculty and staff and highlight successful and unsuccessful evaluation practices. The collection includes: (1) "A Conceptual Framework for Staff Evaluation," by Al Smith; (2) "Evaluation of Full-Time Faculty," by Lawrence H. Poole and Donald A. Dellow; (3)…

This report reviews the research and literature on the improvement of college teaching through use of a model that stresses a supportive teaching culture and helps motivate individual faculty members to improve their teaching by utilizing a variety of sources of informative feedback. The sources include: colleagues and consultants, department…

One of the main obstacles to effective faculty evaluation is the inability to reach consensus on the evaluation's intended purpose. On one hand, faculty evaluation has a formative purpose, supporting faculty development, growth, and self-improvement, while it also has a summative purpose in that it provides data to make personnel decisions on…

The need for faculty development, approaches to faculty development, and 16 postulates for a successful faculty development program are examined, based on a survey of literature of the 1970s. Among the reasons faculty development is needed are the following: decreased faculty mobility caused by declining university enrollments, financial problems…

Despite a history of conflicting research on its reliability and validity, student evaluation of faculty (SEF) has typically not been viewed as an infringement on academic freedom; it has generally been taken for granted that SEF is appropriate and necessary. However, informal and reasoned analyses of the issue indicate that because SEF is used…

The use of explicit, written criteria to evaluate college and university faculty is examined. Four major issues concerning faculty evaluation are as follows: the desired outcomes of faculty evaluation; the functions of faculty activity that are to be evaluated; the criteria that should be used for each area evaluated; and the procedures for…