Course-level factors and undergraduate engineering students' ratings of instruction

Post-course instructor ratings are a common practice at universities in Europe, Australia, and North America. Rather than solely describing teaching practice, however, such ratings may be associated with a range of non-pedagogical factors. We explored engineering students' instructor ratings at...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean journal of engineering education Vol. 49; no. 4; pp. 769 - 784
Main Authors Klopfer, Michelle D., Knight, David B., Grohs, Jacob R., Case, Scott W.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Taylor & Francis 03.07.2024
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Class Size
Colleges & universities
course grade
Educational Practices
Engineering education
faculty
Humanities Instruction
Pedagogy
Ratings
Ratings & rankings
Student evaluations
Students
Teacher Promotion
Teachers
Teaching
Teaching Methods
Universities
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0304-3797
1469-5898
DOI10.1080/03043797.2023.2224245

Cover

More Information
Summary:Post-course instructor ratings are a common practice at universities in Europe, Australia, and North America. Rather than solely describing teaching practice, however, such ratings may be associated with a range of non-pedagogical factors. We explored engineering students' instructor ratings at a large United States institution, investigating relationships between overall instructor rating and some of those non-pedagogical factors, including subject area, class size, and students' course grades. Instructor ratings were more favourable in humanities courses than in science or math courses, and students gave higher ratings to instructors who taught smaller class sizes. The strongest relationship existed between overall rating and students' course grades: students who received A's rated instructors an average 0.84 points higher on a 6-point scale than students who received F's. Students who withdrew from a course provided the lowest instructor ratings. When instructor ratings are used as metrics of teaching ability in discussions related to promotion, tenure, or salary adjustments, there is an inherent inequity in the system that must be acknowledged beyond already well-documented biases, as non-pedagogical factors often outside of the instructor's control may be significantly associated with those ratings.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:0304-3797
1469-5898
DOI:10.1080/03043797.2023.2224245