A Study On The Effectiveness Of Students' Evaluation Of Teaching In High Institutes

Students' Evaluation of Teaching (SET) is an assessment of teachers' class-teaching effectiveness. As an important method of evaluating class-teaching, it plays an important role in improving the teaching quality and boosting the high institutes' development. It was thought highly of and widely applied to the management of high institutes. It has aroused a great debate since its appearance. The validity of the evaluation affects exertion of its function since it's related to teachers' approval of the assessment and significance of improving teaching quality. Thus the effectiveness of SET is the key to all the problems concerned. Many studies inside and outside focus on the factors which affect the validity and reliability of SET. The influencing factors mainly come from teachers, students and curriculum. The present study aims at finding out whether the evaluators (the students) truthfully reflected their evaluation to the teachers and whether subjective factors influenced and interfered with the results. It also studies whether the evaluation results were influenced by the class-scale, students' interests of study, the importance of specializational degree, curriculum and the students' personal characteristics. The survey sample consists of 370 students in Jianghan University. The questionnaire is used as the major instrument and the data obtained from the questionnaire are processed in SPSS. The author makes some suggestions of improving the effectiveness of SET. This thesis is divided into the following chapters. In Chapter I, it contents the background, purpose and meaning of the research. Chapter II is the theoretical background and literature review. In Chapter III, it mainly describes the methodology of the research. The reasons for the study, methods and process of the research were pointed out. Chapter four is the data-analyzing and results-finding of the research. It discusses different views on SET and analyses the influencing factors of SET. In Chapter five, the author draws a conclusion of improving the validity of SET and makes some suggestions for SET which involved bettering the reorganization of the students, forming scientific and effective evaluating criteria, decreasing the potential deviation, applying the results correctly and developing new ways of evaluation.