A Tel Aviv University (Israel) study applied qualitative methods to evaluate a model for improvement of university teaching. A departmental instruction specialist treats instructional quality issues comprehensively within a department. Two years of implementation in the physics department have resulted in increased instructional quality, faculty…

A survey of 300 college faculty across disciplines suggested that many faculty encounter conditions that hinder collegiality concerning undergraduate teaching issues. These difficulties include faculty isolation and fragmented communication, constrained resources, and inappropriate evaluation and reward systems. Results also suggest ways in which…

This study sought to identify major factors of teaching evaluation as related to professors' overall teaching effectiveness. Undergraduate and graduate students at a university in the southeastern United States were asked to rate 126 business faculty through anonymous course evaluations. Students rated faculty on 12 specific items related to…

This report describes the development and psychometric qualities of a new instrument to assess clinical teaching effectiveness in medical education. The strength of the instrument is seen to lie in the qualitative development process involving iterative checking with key stakeholders; its high reliability, validity, and feasibility; and its ease…

College faculty are unlike other teachers in that they are not trained to teach and have little supervision. Effectiveness of language instruction is more difficult than most to evaluate. Contemporary models of supervision tend to emphasize training, not evaluation, even for teaching assistants. Some see teaching as an art, not susceptible to…

As technical communication is a young academic discipline, evaluating technical communication faculty for promotion, tenure, and merit purposes requires special awareness and care. To determine reasonable expectations of faculty achievement, a study documented the range, types, and frequency of activities of 12 professors and 12 associate…

The Academic Senate for the California Community Colleges developed this series of criteria for use by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges as a basis for developing standards for evaluating the collective faculty of a college. Criteria dealing with the characteristics of…

A study was conducted to examine the relationship between community college faculty's perceptions of the frequency of evaluation activities and their perceptions of their own effectiveness and effort in classroom teaching, curriculum development, professional development, college service, student advising, and maintenance activities. A…

Recent research (1978-1982) on student evaluations of teaching is reviewed, including: influence of background variables pertaining to the student, the teacher, and the learning environment; the dimensions of the teaching being evaluated; the validity of students' evaluations; the "Doctor Fox" effect and its implications for validity; the…

As the accountability movement has brought forth renewed interest in the quality of teaching and new demands for faculty evaluation, it could be expected that the relationship between the two would have created the foundation for a rigorous program of faculty evaluation. Instead, educators continued a fruitless search for qualities and behaviors…

The need for objectivity in evaluating faculty is briefly addressed, and a model by which professional activities may be quantified is presented. A list of possible activities ranked in groups of equal point value, by which faculty can generate merit points, is presented. An attempt was made to equalize the potential point production values in…

Two student evaluation surveys developed in the United States were administered to a sample of University of Sydney students to determine their applicability in Australia. The Endeavor Instructional Rating Form (Frey et al.) measures seven components of effective teaching that have been demonstrated with the use of factor analysis in several…

A major criticism leveled at professional education faculty appears to be that their elementary or secondary school experience is often outdated and inadequate. The purpose of this study was to explore the validity of this criticism. A questionnaire designed to investigate the qualifications and elementary secondary teaching experience of teacher…

Student and faculty respondents were asked to rate the importance of selected teacher traits in terms of student learning, and to make judgments concerning the value and use of student evaluations of teachers. The results indicate that students and faculty differ somewhat in the importance assigned to some teacher traits, such as "instructor…

A decade of interest in the evaluation of college teaching has produced both a wide variety of approaches and a concise set of practical guidelines for assisting college teachers in improving instruction. (Authors/MSE)