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How Well Do We Teach?

Luke Faulkenberry, Carole Goodson, Susan Miertschin, Barbara Stewart

University of Houston, College of Technology

How well do we teach? This question is sometimes answered through scores from student surveys of teaching effectiveness (SSTE) administered to students near completion of a course. Sometimes these survey results are the only data compiled systematically and available to use as an indicator of teaching performance of faculty. Thus, it is important to understand proper uses and interpretations as well as limitations of these measures.

The Assessment and Continuous Improvement Committee (ACI) of the College of Technology (CoT) at the University of Houston (UH) was formed, representing faculty in diverse program areas, to do college-wide assessment planning and implementation. A component of assessment planning was to consider issues related to SSTE, both from the perspective of what is contained in the literature about such instruments and with respect to results within the college. In order to accomplish this goal, the ACI committee reviewed reported research results regarding teaching evaluations and analyzed our own instrument, process and results. This paper examines this information, particularly what the literature tells us, the results of our own teaching evaluation implementation, and how SSTE results can be used.

What do Student Surveys of Teaching Effectiveness Measure? Because of ease of implementation and analysis, student surveys of teaching effectiveness will be with us – at least on the short term – for better or worse. Although not without controversy, they do have validity in that they are a measure of student reaction to teaching effectiveness. Reaction is a concept that is defined in the training literature. Specifically, it refers to how those that participate in training as trainees react to the training process. When you measure trainee reaction, you are measuring aspects of customer satisfaction.1 Similarly, SSTEs measure aspects of student satisfaction. As in business, it is important in academia to measure student satisfaction because:

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Stewart, B., & Goodson, C., & Miertschin, S., & Faulkenberry, L. (2005, June), How Well Do We Teach? Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14284