Building effectiveness in teaching through targeted evaluation and response: connecting evaluation to teaching improvement in higher education

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a model for integrating student evaluation of teaching results with academic development opportunities, in new ways that take into account theoretical and practical developments in both fields. The model is described in terms of five phases or components: (1) the basic student evaluation system; (2) an interpretive guidance system that helps lecturers understand and interpret their results; (3) a longitudinal reporting system that initiates opportunities for staff to engage in personal and professional development in the context of a learning community; (4) a structured professional development programme that builds a faculty learning community, in which the members utilise extended cycles of evaluation based on (5) a comprehensive evaluation model designed to develop and encourage the collection of evaluation data from a variety of sources concerning the quality and impact of teaching: the teacher; student learning outcomes; student experience; and the teacher’s peers.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to his colleagues at Griffith Institute of Higher Education, and to Dr Debra Bath, Griffith University, who commented on an earlier draft of this paper. Any errors in logic or judgment remain the author’s own, of course.

Notes

1. As these authors rightly point out, these results do not compare different types of feedback with a no feedback control (ibid.); however, the inference about their relative rankings still stands.

2. Using the Overall Ratings Item for teaching ‘All things considered, how would you rate this staff member’s overall performance as a university teacher’, one‐way ANOVA, F(3,3901) = 45.98, p < 0.0001 with simple comparisons using Bonferroni post‐hoc adjustment of alpha reveals significant differences between all discipline pairs except the two professional groupings (professional social science‐based disciplines and professional natural science‐based disciplines).