Teaching excellence in higher education can be defined and studied in different ways, but research efforts to date have often focused on institutional or instructor perspectives. This article uses a data set of over 500 open-ended comments submitted by Political Science undergraduates as part of a teaching award process to identify themes that…

Purpose: Although student evaluation of teaching (SET) is widely used, there has been a significant disparity between its potential benefits with the actual impact on improving educational quality. This study aims to inquire into the factors contributing to this discrepancy and the underlying mechanisms hindering the effective utilisation of SET.…

Objective: This study sought to explore the optimum factor structure among the three subsections of The Experience of Teaching and Learning Questioner (ETLQ). Method: Exploratory factor analysis was employed to compare four competing exploratory models within the Approaches to Learning and Studying, Perceptions of the Teaching-Learning Environment…

This paper aims to offer an understanding of how (intersectional) bias in student evaluations of teaching affects academics' mental health and career progression. Despite the widespread acceptance of student evaluations, an emerging stream of research has begun to highlight the biases and prejudices that underpin much of data collection when it…

Kotter's (1996. "Leading Change." Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press) model is one of the most frequently cited guides for implementing planned organizational change. While this model is widely used across many industries and contexts, including higher education, there are few research studies and cases that provide in-depth…

Students' feedback is usually gathered in institutions of higher education to evaluate the teaching quality from the students' perspective, using questionnaires administered at the end of the courses. These evaluations are useful to pinpoint the course strengths, identify areas of improvement, and understand the factors that contribute to…

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) gather crucial feedback on student experiences of teaching and learning and have been used for decades to evaluate the quality of teaching and student experience of instruction. In this paper, we make the case for an important improvement to the analysis of SET data that can further refine its interpretation.…

We proposed an extended form of the Govindarajulu and Barnett margin of error (MOE) equation and used it with an analysis of variance experimental design to examine the effects of aggregating student evaluations of teaching (SET) ratings on the MOE statistic. The interpretative validity of SET ratings can be questioned when the number of students…

The transforming contexts of higher education are heightening the imperative for more sophisticated understandings of student learning. An increasingly critical challenge is how to most effectively engage with student perspectives to more effectively understand the nature of their learning experiences. Traditionally, student ratings have been the…

Anonymous student evaluation of teaching (SET) is a universal practice in higher education. We conducted a mixed-methods approach to investigate the nature and impact of anonymous SET commentary in the Australian higher education sector. Respondents shared a range of detailed SET exemplars, which revealed the extent of hurtful, defamatory and…

National University's Master of Science in Educational Counseling underwent a revision in 2022 utilizing the approach of deriving program learning outcomes directly from the California Teaching Commission standards for school counselors. The program is offered solely in an online format. This study was undertaken to assess the program in terms of…

Traditional aspects of student engagement have focused on how students feel or think about their instructor, the content being taught, the design of the course, and occasionally the institution, barely extrapolating what truly is meaningful for the student. As documented in various systematic measuring of the student experience, historically, the…

Through co-occurrence analysis of 1139 documents (1964-2018) we identified discussions about the implementation of student teaching evaluation (SET). We found that: (1) Attention to SET originated in the US in the 1970s, spreading to German-speaking countries in the mid-1990s and continuing in China and Latin America in the early 2000s. (2) SET is…

Making sense of student feedback and engagement is important for informing pedagogical decision-making and broader strategies related to student retention and success in higher education courses. Although learning analytics and other strategies are employed within courses to understand student engagement, the interpretation of data for larger data…

In "Grading the College," Scott M. Gelber offers a comprehensive history of evaluating teaching and learning in higher education. He complicates the conventional narrative that portrays evaluation as a newfangled assault on the integrity of higher education while acknowledging that there are many compelling reasons to oppose those…