Effective teaching: The students' perspective

Abstract

Teaching evaluations are a very useful instrument for instructors and often have great importance for tenure and promotions. Particularly, new faculty may encounter difficulties in identifying the factors that effectively influence students' decisions about evaluation scores. There are many interesting questions in the evaluation questionnaire, but many times only the scores for a few questions are relevant for tenure and promotion decisions. We selected four questions of particular interest: "the course as a whole was...?"; "the course content was...?"; "the instructor's contribution to the course was...?"; "the instructor's effectiveness in teaching the subject matter was...?". A preliminary survey asked students to identify their specific judgment process related to the scores they assign to these questions. Student responses were analyzed and aggregated into categories. The results of our analysis are likely to be of interest to new faculty trying to improve their teaching evaluation scores. However, they may be useful to others involved in education, as the practical factors suggested by students may not always be obvious. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2008.