Research on peer review to date has focused on its role as a formal compliance mechanism, a process for enhancing and developing teaching practice, and as a considerable source of anxiety for educators. In this paper, we draw on scholarly reflections from our experience of undertaking a reciprocal, formative peer review in an Australian higher…

A significant body of work problematises the assumption that student evaluations of teaching (SET) actually measure teaching quality. This is concerning, given that SET are increasingly relied upon not only to evaluate candidates for employment (so job acquisition is influenced by flawed data) but also to inform performance metrics for those in…

Over recent decades, peer review of teaching has become an important mechanism for improving the quality of teaching in higher education. While there is considerable international research on peer review of teaching outcomes, these are not widely reported within Australian universities. This paper reports on a systematic review of published…

When the World Health Organisation declared the novel Coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a change occurred across all levels of the educational landscape. It posed specific challenges in the context of initial teacher education (ITE) and inhibited teacher educators from physically observing pre-service teachers' lessons on school placement.…

The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career.…

Australian universities are increasingly resorting to the use of journal metrics such as impact factors and ranking lists in appraisal and promotion processes, and are starting to set quantitative "performance expectations" which make use of such journal-based metrics. The widespread use and misuse of research metrics is leading to…

Despite tutors' importance, they often encounter inadequate professional development and support. This study describes the impact of peer observation of teaching activities on tutors' professional development using multiple data-sets over a three-year period. The data was analysed according to three themes: situated learning, reflective practice…

Peer review of teaching has become an accepted educational procedure in Australia to quality assure the quality of teaching practices. The institutional implementation of the peer review process can be viewed as genuine desire to improve teaching quality or an imposition from above as a measure of accountability and performativity. One approach is…

The success of peer review of teaching (PRT) in shaping teaching practice during an academic's formative years may depend on the peers' teaching experience and the frequency of evaluation. Two Australian early-career University lecturers with no previous experience of peer review performed a single PRT on one another following a one week academic…

Teachers in academia are usually not required to have teacher training but must often be evaluated by their students who expect them to have much better teaching qualifications than their high school teachers. However, teachers in elementary and high schools are required to go through several years of teacher training, resulting in a teaching…

A concern for social justice pervades the espoused curriculum of many pre-service teaching programmes, but the extent to which that curriculum influences the beliefs students hold is an open question. With the goal of developing an instrument suitable for evaluating such beliefs at the degree programme level, the present study analysed responses…

This study examines the work-related attitudes of Australian accounting academics. A survey of 350 academics provides an insight into the specific organisational and institutional factors associated with the dissatisfaction, stress levels, and propensity to remain of academics. Of particular concern is the lower level of satisfaction and…

Purpose: The paper aims to disseminate solutions to common problems in student evaluation processes. It proposes that student evaluation can be applied to quality assurance and improving learning and teaching. The paper presents solutions in the areas of: presenting outcomes as performance indicators, constructing appropriate surveys, improving…

Adopting a pluralistic view of academics' informal learning that draws on Habermas (1987), this article suggests that a great deal of academic learning results from tensions and incompatibilities between individual interests and those of employing institutions increasingly resonant with the ideology of New Public Management (NPM), with its…

Based on student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings from 1,432 units of study over a period of a year, representing 74,490 individual sets of ratings, and including a significant number of units offered in wholly online mode, we confirm the significant influence of class size, year level, and discipline area on at least some SET ratings. We also…