Date of Award

1982

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Program

Higher Education Administration EdD

First Advisor

Edward A. Streeter

Second Advisor

Jerome D. Thayer

Third Advisor

Gary L. Dickson

Abstract

Problem. Educational researchers have little consensus of opinion regarding the usefulness of student evaluations and much less of the use of student evaluative feedback as a means of improving teachers' performance. However, because a movement of educational accountability pervades institutions of higher learning and administrators desire to keep students content, many school administrators periodically assess the performance of their teaching faculty by student evaluation. This study investigates the impact of student evaluative feedback on the perception of the teaching faculty at Andrews University, with the hope that the findings may help resolve whether student evaluation is helpful for improvement of teaching quality through the teachers' change of perception.

Method. Two sources of data were used: (1) Teachers were evaluated by students as part of the institution's teaching-evaluation program. The results, which were obtained from the Institutional Research Office, served as feedback to teachers as well as for correlational studies. (2) The full-time teaching faculty of the University were randomly divided into six groups to meet the requirement of the study design. Self-rating responses regarding their teaching performance were gathered from the teachers over a period of six months. One hundred and fourteen teachers participated - - a 70.4 percent participation. Two statistical methods were used for analyzing the data: stepwise multiple regression and zero-order correlation. The five hypotheses were tested for their incremental R2, correlation, and correlation differences.

Findings. At the .05 level, four of five null hypotheses in the study were supported. The study revealed that student-evaluative feedback did not have any significant impact on the perception of AU's teachers regarding their teaching performance, both short-term and long-term. Neither were the three areas to which the thirteen items (variables) belong significantly different from one another. There was also no correlation found between the self-rating of the teachers and the student rating, except for one variable (Integrate Christian concepts into the course content). However, it was found that two of the demographic variables (sex and tenure) occasionally played a significant part in explaining the variance in teachers' self-rating scores.

Conclusion. The findings suggest that the population under study either does not regard student evaluation accurate or important or is unwilling to admit or change their habits, attitude, and philosophy of teaching. The faculty members were not affected by the student-evaluative feedback.

Subject Area

College teachers--Rating of.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dissertations/698/

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