"Student ratings are far from the bias-free indicators of instructor effectiveness and quality that many have touted them to be," conclude psychologists Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci in an article in the September issue of Change.
The Instructor Talk framework is a novel research variable that could yield insights into instructor effectiveness, origins of student resistance, and methods for overcoming stereotype threat.
There were strong positive associations between final survey ratings of instructor effectiveness and ratings of confident (r = 0.568), engaging (r = 0.696), enthusiasm (r = 0.588), organized (r = 0.667), relate (r = 0.653), relaxed (r = 0.612), respect (r = 0.686), and understanding (r = 0.619).
Spearman rank correlations were also performed on the pooled data to determine whether student perceptions of their instructors' teaching effectiveness or student perceptions of how much they learned from their instructors, as rated on the final surveys, correlated with any of the 13 student ratings of descriptors on the final surveys (α = 0.05; SPSS 19.0).
Instructor teaching effectiveness is often evaluated by institutions for the purposes of instructor retention, but these evaluations also provide feedback to instructors who wish to modify their teaching to foster student learning.
This is evidenced by the moderate to strong associations between student ratings of instructor teaching effectiveness and perception of learning and all student ratings of the instructor descriptors, except strict.
For the final survey, pooled undergraduate ratings of their instructor's effectiveness in teaching the material found that these ratings correlated significantly with all final survey ratings of instructor descriptors (α = 0.05).
Please rate the instructor's effectiveness in the following areas: 1. Organizing the course: a) Excellent b) Very Good c) Good d) Fair e) Poor 2.
The finally derived tree (decision rules) included only three variables survey items that asked students to rate the instructor's effectiveness at: 1. Helping students achieve course objectives, 2.
Jenkins, Bugeja and Barber (2014), compared the effect of additional course content information and additional restrictive course boundary information such as fixed deadlines and expectations on students' perception of instructor's effectiveness showed that addition of the latter leads to a more positive impression.
