FACTORS INVOLVED IN TEACHER EVALUATION INSTRUMENTS: WHAT PERCENTAGE OF GOOD TEACHING IS INVOLVED?

One form of evaluation of the quality of teaching by professors at universities is the utilization of an instrument that involves asking students questions regarding the professor’s teaching, assigning numerical ratings for those questions, and compiling the results for each course that the professor teaches. The compiled results for professors at a given university can be compared and those professors with the highest results may be acknowledged.

Such teaching evaluation instruments raise the question as to what factors are involved in the student evaluation results. Those factors may be related to teaching proficiency, or they may be totally unrelated to the quality of the professor’s teaching.

The teacher evaluation instrument used at Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST) provides an opportunity for each department to add yet additional questions to the instrument, if they wish, to further evaluate their professor’s teaching. As an experiment, the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at MST added several questions one year, not to further evaluate our professor’s teaching, but rather to investigate the factors involved in the student’s evaluations of their professors.

The additional questions included: the student’s grade to that point in the class, the grade expected by the student for the class, the student’s current GPA, the size of the class, the percentage of non-major students in the class, etc. The student’s final grade in the class was appended.

The results of this study showed that the student’s evaluation of his/her professor correlated very close to the grade he/she expected from the course. There was also a correlation with the student’s actual grade received in the course and with the student’s cumulative GPA. Importantly, a given professor received significantly higher evaluations from smaller more advanced courses than he/she did from his/her larger classes. Equally importantly, a given professor received significantly higher evaluations for classes composed largely of departmental majors as opposed to his/her classes composed predominantly of non-majors.

The results indicate that although student evaluations of professor instruments do measure the quality of a professor’s teaching, they also involve significant amounts of non-teaching factors.