Validity is an important issue when measuring teaching quality using student evaluations. This study examined the effects of psychology students' subjective clarity about study contents and their prior interest in the subject as variables possibly biasing the evaluations of psychology courses. German students (N = 292) evaluated lectures and…

In recent years, the Australian tertiary education sector embraced the gradual adaption of the dual mode system in course delivery in universities and higher degree education providers. In such systems, students have the option, as well as the flexibility, to undertake the same course in a face-to-face (F2F) environment and/or an online…

In their study about the Dr. Fox lecture, Naftulin, Ware, and Donnelly (1973) claimed that an expressive speaker who delivered an attractive lecture devoid of any content could seduce students into believing that they had learned something significant. Over the decades, the study has been (and still is) cited hundreds of times and used by…

This set of experiments assessed the influence of RateMyProfessors.com profiles, and the perceived credibility of those profiles, on students' evaluations of professors and retention of material. In Study 1, 302 undergraduates were randomly assigned to read positive or negative RateMyProfessors.com profiles with comments that focused on…

Faculty members ("N" = 39) from two universities had their lectures recorded. From these videos, we selected 5-min vignettes centered on eight dimensions of the Teacher Behavior Checklist. Undergraduate students from two universities ("N" = 753) viewed three 5-min video clips of college teachers across various disciplines.…

This study explores alternative approaches for teaching general education courses burdened with serving extremely large enrollments. It compares the effectiveness of a self-contained course in which each course section is taught by one instructor to a large lecture/small lab format in which all course enrollees attend one large lecture section and…

This study contributes to research that characterises the affective learning that is evoked and taken on by students in response to their perceptions of their contextual learning environments. Interview-discussions were held with lecturers of both introductory and higher-level physics courses (n = 3) concerning how they formulated their patterns…

In an investigation of students' prejudicial biases against instructors who smoke, 61 female and 16 male undergraduates watched and listened to a 20-min lecture about parasomnias, completed a survey asking for instructor evaluation ratings and ratings of perceived learning, and completed a lecture-retention test with multiple-choice questions to…

This paper investigates the variability of student teaching effectiveness survey evaluations among the various recitation sections when lecture/recitation instruction is utilized with the same instructor both delivering the lecture and teaching all of the corresponding recitation sections. The research results indicate that when an instructor…

To what extent do students and teachers hold similar beliefs about excellent teaching? Do differences in beliefs have practical implications (e.g., how students rate their teachers on end-of-semester evaluation forms)? In Study 1, undergraduate students (N=414) and faculty members (N=128) responded to questionnaires assessing their perceptions of…

A total of 152 first- and second-year undergraduates rated the effectiveness of their lecturers using three response formats. A scale on which each point gave a precise percentage label was more accurate than one with all points verbally labeled or with only the end points labeled. (SLD)

Evaluated the influence of three testing conditions on college students' ratings of instruction, along with relationships between ratings and amount learned. Students rated instruction lowest immediately after taking the posttest. Correlations between learning and instructional ratings were low. Agreement between perceived amount learned and…

Evaluations by students of the University of Mississippi were compared to the evaluations of students at Dokuz Eylul University related to specific lectures on communication skills. The students of the University of Mississippi were Native Speakers of English (NSE) while the students at Dokuz Eylul University spoke English as a Foreign Language…

Reports survey results of 126 students enrolled in first- or second-year biology courses concerning the effectiveness of different teaching methods within the lecture format. Indicates that the traditional, didactic lecture, although perceived as least effective, was regarded as highly effective when enhanced by active student involvement.…

Compares differences in successive pretest/posttest scores for 46 undergraduate volunteers following the application of distinct teaching formats to each of 3 consecutive subsections of a human physiology course. Indicates scores increased favorably for audio-visual lecture and self-study tutorial formats but no significant increase for didactic…