Approved by the city's board of education in July 1982, Houston's Special Education Team Member Quality Assurance Program is intended to help assure continual professional growth for special education teachers. By establishing a system of faculty performance assessment, the program seeks to identify teachers' strengths and weaknesses, improve…

A study was conducted at Fayetteville Technical Institute to compare the effectiveness of full- and part-time faculty in terms of evaluations from department chairs, student evaluations, grades assigned, and class attrition. Study findings, based on evaluation results, grades, and attrition rates for 37 full-time and 47 part-time faculty employed…

Professionalism and flexibility in learning are considered in five seminar papers. In "Recommendations for Learning," Donald Bligh offers 17 recommendations for learning, based on the final discussions of a seminar of the Society for Research into Higher Education. The principles of professionalism and flexibility are applied to course…

Efforts since 1974 to create an acceptable merit pay system at Bowling Green State University's Department of Educational Foundations and Inquiry (EDFI) are described. Construction of the activity-point merit approach that has been used since 1980 began in 1979. Each of the 24 faculty in the EDFI department listed activities or products that they…

Students holding diametrically opposed opinions about the quality of instruction at the University were compared on a number of other attitude variables. A comparison was made of 2,310 students choosing item 2B and 1,625 students choosing item 3B on the 1969 University Student Census, an attitude and activities inventory given annually to all…

Some of the theoretical and methodological problems with current practices in evaluating instruction at the higher education level are reviewed. Controversy over the evaluation of instruction in higher education has resulted at least in part from inadequate instrumentation. The instruments for instructional rating now used include administrator…

In order to develop a humanistic approach to evaluating faculty, a pilot study was conducted of 27 students and 14 instructors in an associate degree program for medical laboratory technicians. Selected personal dimensions of the sample population were examined to chart each individual's personality, theoretical learning preferences, modalities of…

In order to appraise the value of teacher peer evaluation as practiced at Los Angeles City College, a questionnaire was sent to 300 counselors, administrators, and tenured faculty. Eighty-four questionnaires were returned. The major finding was that the present system was ineffective in that the teaching characteristics of those evaluated did not…

The perceptions of preservice student teachers as to the effectiveness of cooperating teachers' behaviors were used in this study to determine the competencies required in a cooperating teacher for each curricular group. During the terminal two weeks of student teaching, three groups of student teachers, one each in elementary education, physical…

Commonly asked questions about methods of faculty evaluation (including student, peer, and self-evaluation) are answered, and guidelines for improving a failing evaluation system are discussed. (MSE)

Formative evaluation of teaching is discussed, and ways of obtaining diagnostic feedback that will lead to improved teaching in large lecture classes are examined. A Teacher Behaviors Inventory is included. (MLW)

Based on the assumption that student learning is the strongest criterion for evaluating effective teaching, three practices that create partnerships between college students, teachers, and faculty peers in understanding quality in teaching and learning are described. The techniques use creation and evaluation of student and faculty course…

Degree of profile similarity across specific evaluations was determined for studies comparing teachers' self-ratings with current student ratings, as were the relative and absolute similarity (or dissimilarity) for certain of the specific instructional dimensions. Implications were explored in terms of individual and subgroup differences.…

This study investigated the relative importance of 9 instructional factors (amount learned, exam fairness, enthusiasm, individual rapport, organization, assignments, group interaction, breadth of materials, course difficulty) in 229 college students' global evaluations of faculty effectiveness in 3 disciplines (accounting, education, geology).…

Analysis of 73 University of Florida faculty portfolios, prepared as part of an instructional improvement program, revealed great variability in quantity, quality, and coherence of evidence presented to support claims of excellence in teaching. Seven guidelines for portfolio preparation, appropriate for different colleges and teaching assignments,…