Effective Criteria For Teaching And Learning

New faculty as well as experienced faculty may sometimes face challenges concerning teaching evaluations. Student perception of what is taught and what is learned may be significantly different from the instructor’s perception and intention. This may become a problem, since education institutions often use student evaluations of teaching as an important criterion for tenure, promotions, retention, or salary raise purposes. The argument goes that student ratings do not help instructors improve their perception of a class unless supported by professional advice. The questions that tend to be of special interest during the evaluation process are: "the course as a whole was...?"; "the course content was...?"; "the instructor's contribution to the course was...?"; "the instructor's effectiveness in teaching the subject matter was...?". In a previous study, we identified that, in fact, engineering students reacted to more particularly defined criteria associated with each question. Those criteria are confirmed by the present study and a quantitative measure can be established for them. A new hierarchy of the student perceived criteria is developed. We show that the SET questions are not testing independent variables but rather correlated ones. A strong correlation between three out of four SET questions has been confirmed and quantitatively assessed. We also report that students reveal triggering factors that override their normal criteria for assigning SET scores. Authors are hopeful that the study may be of interest to new and established engineering instructors. Furthermore, in order to increase the relevance of our conclusions we are planning to use this pilot study as a guideline for a broader research to be conducted at a handful of universities involving different engineering disciplines.