Interference Factors Of Students’ Evaluation Of Teaching In Chinese Universities And Colleges

Students’ Evaluation of Teaching (SET) is the most widely used way and one of the most effective ways in the field of evaluation of teachers. Students’ Evaluation of Teaching in colleges and universities originated from America in the1920s. However, SET started rather late in our country and didn’t start until1984in Beijing Normal University. By the late1980s, SET was carried out in many colleges and universities of our country gradually. By the early90s, SET in our country began to improve and came into normalization gradually, then a lot of university managers and researchers began to pay close attention to SET and conducted research on the related issues. Since21st century, with the development of higher education, especially the development of network information technology, SET began popular within colleges and universities in China universities. Those colleges and universities have set up more scientific and reasonable evaluation system and evaluation index system, in addition, evaluation results were widely used in the management of teachers.Although SET has been adopted and listed in the regular management procedures by the majority of colleges and universities in our country as an effective teachers’ management method, the question of SET still can’t be ignored. Many experts and scholars researched on the effectiveness and feasibility of SET, but they mainly concentrated on the index design of evaluation. In fact, there are also factors that can affect the accuracy of evaluation results besides the index of SET, and the factors are the focus of this paper. Based on the research achievements of others, influencing factors of SET were researched using the method of empirical investigation in this paper.The factors are mainly divided into four parts:teachers’ background, students’ background, curriculum background and management. Teachers’ background includes professional title, experience, expressive power, and character; students’ background includes the motivation of course selection, expected results and expectation of courses; curriculum background includes class scale, the nature of course, course level, compulsory courses and optional courses. The factor about management includes anonymous evaluation, evaluation methods and evaluation purposes. Questionnaire was first designed, and by making statistics about the influences of various factors and analyzing the data, related conclusions were obtained. The results show that the influencing factors mentioned in this paper does have effect on the accuracy of evaluation results. Teachers’background has the greatest influence on SET, especially the expressiveness and characters of teachers. Motivation of course selection in the factor of students’background has some influence on SET, and expected results and expectation of courses have little or no effect on SET. Nature of course and course level in the factor of curriculum background have some influences on SET, and others have little effect. The influence of management is not significant except a little influence made by evaluation purposes.