Student evaluation of teaching and learning as the nexus for quality culture in higher education

Abstract

The increasingly knowledge-driven global economy is making higher education to be a key driver of economic competitiveness. The imperative for institutions of higher learning is, therefore, to improve on employment skills which call for quality teaching as well as the programs. However, many universities focus on public assessments and international rankings whose comparisons tend to overemphasize research, as the unit for institutional value without assessing the quality of teaching. Internally, many universities use overall student ratings in the summative evaluations as the primary faculty evaluation systems. Active involvement by and meaningful input from students is a significant factor in the success of the teaching-learningevaluation process. Nevertheless, current studies have not looked into the role of students’ evaluation in improving the quality of teaching. This study set out to investigate the role of student evaluation in improving the quality of teaching in institutions of higher learning. Cross-sectional research design was utilized where 30 faculty staff and 112 students randomly selected were requested to fill out a self-response opinionnaire regarding the value of evaluation of lecturers by students. The data was used to triangulate course evaluation form filled out by 876 students for 45 course units that were randomly sampled from a pool of evaluation data in quality Assurance course evaluation data base. The results show that students consider an improvement in teaching to be the winning outcome of an educational evaluation system. The second preferred outcome was using teaching evaluations to improve course content and format. Students' motivation to participate in teaching evaluations is also impacted significantly by their expectation that they will be able to provide meaningful feedback. Since quality student input is an essential antecedent of meaningful student evaluations of teaching effectiveness, the results of this study should be considered thoughtfully as the evaluation system is designed, implemented and operated.