Exploring the impact of faculty reflection on weekly student evaluations of teaching

This exploratory study considered Larrivee’s assessment of teachers’ reflective practice levels by using a formative, weekly, online student evaluation of teaching (SET) tool through a virtual learning environment (VLE) as a means to encourage reflective practice. In-depth interviews were conducted with six faculty members in three departments at a university college in the UK. The study found that: (a) faculty who experienced surface-level reflection were more likely to have a reactive reflection style; and (b) faculty who experienced higher levels of reflection were more likely to have a proactive reflection style. Overall, the tool was found to be an efficient means of encouraging reflection by all participants and demonstrated that reflective practice could come about as a result of these weekly formative SETs. The study concludes with suggestions for academic development and future research on reflection that could be conducted using SETs via a VLE.

If you build it will they come? Exploring the student perspective of weekly student evaluations of teaching

This exploratory study investigated the students’ use of formative, weekly, online evaluations of teaching through a virtual learning environment. Results were based on in-depth interviews of seven students at a rural university college in the UK. Students from different genders, education levels and backgrounds volunteered for the study. The students thought it was a good tool and useful for providing anonymous feedback. However, their motivation to fill in the evaluations every week varied throughout the period of study, and the weekly feedback soon became routine and too onerous a task, and thus had a tendency towards being superficially conducted. Students were more inclined to comment on negative issues, rather than critically analyse positive ones. They also tended to be more positive towards conducting the evaluation if the lecturer discussed them and/or made changes to their future lectures.

Just schooling : explorations in the cultural politics of teaching

How are classroom relations influenced by the language that teachers use and the stories they tell about their students? Just Schooling is an exercise in the cultural politics of teaching. It invites teachers and interested others to rethink what they know about social justice and to rework how they engage in the practices of teaching (what they say and do), particularly in relation to how these influence the lives of students. Informed by a recognitive view of social justice, Just Schooling analyses the various discourses and ideologies mobilized in classrooms that implicitly and explicitly determine what is understood by (i) the nature and centrality of language, (ii) the purposes and meaning of education, and (iii) the diversity of students, particularly with respect to their gender, race and social class but also their learning dis/abilities. Throughout, the authors argue for a democratization of classroom relations, beginning with students' and teachers' personal lives and connecting these with wider contexts, as a way of addressing the advantages and disadvantages traditionally reproduced by schooling.

An institutional study of the influence of ‘onlineness’ on student evaluation of teaching in a dual mode Australian university

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is now commonplace in many universities internationally. The most common criticism of SET practices is that they are influenced by a number of non-teaching-related factors. More recently, there has been dramatic growth in online education internationally, but only limited research on the use of SET to evaluate online teaching. This paper presents a large-scale and detailed investigation, using the institutional SET data from an Australian university with a significant offering of wholly online units, and whose institutional SET instrument contains items relating to student perceptions of online technologies in teaching and learning. The relationship between educational technology and SET is not neutral. The mean ratings for the ‗online‘ aspects of SET are influenced by factors in the wider teaching and learning environment, and the overall perception of teaching quality is influenced by whether a unit is offered in wholly online mode or not.

Student evaluation of teaching data 2009-2010

This dataset consists of a summary of publicly available student evaluation of teaching (SET) data for the annual period of trimester 2 2009, trimester 3 2009/2010 and trimester 1 2010, from the Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units (SETU) portal.

The data was analysed to include mean rating sets for 1432 units of study, and represented 74498 sets of SETU ratings, 188391 individual student enrolements and 58.5 percent of all units listed in the Deakin University handbook for the period under consideration, to identify any systematic influences on SET results at Deakin University.

The data reported for a unit included:
• total enrolment;
• total number of responses; and
• computed response rate for the enrolment location(s) selected

And, the data reported for each of the ten core SETU items included:
• number of responses;
• mean rating;
• standard deviation of the mean rating;
• percentage agreement;
• percentage disagreement; and
• percentage difference.

A cross-national study of teaching and learning in primary science classrooms

This presentation reports on the methodological issues confronting an Australian-German-Taiwanese team planning comparative video ethnographic research into primary science classrooms. The issues that will be canvassed include: the benefits of cross-cultural comparisons in providing perspectives on local practice, the theoretical justifications of such comparisons, selection of cases for comparison and possibilities for claiming cultural representativeness, the planning of appropriate data sets, the different comparative stories offered by different analytical frames, practical issues of communication and data sharing, and issues of entanglement of language and culture in the analysis.

Examining the aesthetic dimensions of teaching : relationships between teacher knowledge, identity and passion

Having an appreciation for the subject, their students and what the subject can offer their students has both cognitive and emotional dimensions for teachers. This paper uses empirical data to explore the efficacy of a Deweyan inspired framework called “Aesthetic Understanding” to scrutinise relationships between teacher knowledge, identity and passion. The paper uses case study data of three teachers of maths and/or science generated from a video study to illustrate the relationships between the three elements of Aesthetic Understanding. The need to value the aesthetic dimensions of teaching when examining the subject-specific nature of secondary teaching is discussed.

The effect of teaching conceptual and image metaphors to EFL learners

Foreign language learners encounter difficulties utilizing metaphorical expressions in everyday language, particularly because the use of metaphors in the discourse context is inescapable. In this study, efforts have been made to provide an effective way for the Iranian language learners to acquire and employ conceptual and image metaphors. The instruction took place on 60 junior students studying at the University of Petroleum Engineering at Ahvaz, a southern city in Iran, who were selected on the basis of their high marks on an English proficiency test. Forty metaphors of both types were presented to the participants during 10 sessions of instruction. To collect data on the learners' performance, a 30- item sentence completion test requiring 'word-given' and 'recognition' type responses was prepared and administered. The results of a statistical t-test indicated no significant difference in the rate of acquiring conceptual and image metaphors (P>.05). Therefore, both metaphors can be successfully taught concurrently with little difficulty.

Active content for preparation of teaching materials

Teaching materials such as study guides have implicit structure that can be exploited to explicitly assist in the learning and teaching process. Document technologies specific to the teaching context generate visible structures and linkages in a consistent manner across multiple course materials. We describe techniques that:

• Create, manage and validate links between the learning objectives, content related to each objective and corresponding assessment task.

• Explicitly present relationships between concepts, as a concept map, related to unit content and external study resources.

• Treat various study resources (study guide, presentation slides) as consistent views.

• Facilitate the use of external media to support multiple modalities.

The process creates teaching content as a single master document which is annotated to: identify learning outcomes associated with topics and exercises, relationships between concepts covered, references to external resources and media, as well as summary points and keywords. Different views of this master document produce the range of course documentation.

Examples of documents include: a study guide with learning outcomes linked to content, concept maps providing a graphical view of key relationships, and presentation slides that generate visual mnemonics for important topics.

While this structure simplifies formatting of learning materials it also offers additional benefits to the teacher. Reports are generated showing that all outcomes are covered and assessed.   Explicitly annotating and visualizing concepts allows the lecturer to ensure that all elements fall within a single scaffold. Simplified access to external media encourages alternative presentation modalities and produces presentations that are easily adapted to new themes.

Student evaluation of teaching : keeping in touch with reality

Student evaluation of teaching is commonplace in many universities and may be the predominant input into the performance evaluation of staff and organisational units. This article used publicly available student evaluation of teaching data to present examples of where institutional responses to evaluation processes appeared to be educationally ineffective and where the pursuit of the ‘right’ student evaluation results appears to have been mistakenly equated with the aim of improved teaching and learning. If the vast resources devoted to student evaluation of teaching are to be effective, then the data produced by student evaluation systems must lead to real and sustainable improvements in teaching quality and student learning, rather than becoming an end in itself.

The joy of teaching

Why do people become teachers? Some of the reasons for entering science and mathematics teaching include: wanting to make a difference, good job conditions, liking young people, loving science and maths, being good at teaching, having had a good maths/science teacher, a shortage of teachers, and a love of learning.

We need good teachers, and especially teachers with good science and chemistry backgrounds. It is also true of all school levels, including primary. Job satisfaction and the joy of teaching are not enough. Everyone needs encouragement, acknowledgement and respect. Everyone needs to know that they and their work are valued. Teachers need these too. It is a good investment in the nation’s future.