A COMPENDIUM OF SCALES for use in the SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

The Original TBC Study
Our approach to accomplishing this task involved exploring a range of personality qualities and
their corresponding behaviors (Buskist et al., 2002). Additionally, we compared faculty and
student perspectives on which of these qualities/behaviors are most important to excellent
teaching. Phase 1 of our research asked undergraduates to list at least three qualities they
judged to be reflective of master teaching at the college and university level. This sample
produced a list of 47 characteristics. We then presented this list to a different group of
undergraduates whom we instructed to “list or otherwise indicate up to three specific
behaviors that reflect these qualities and characteristics.”
We next analyzed students’ behavioral descriptors for commonalities. In many instances they
found the descriptors students used to characterize the 47 qualities showed substantial
overlap, which resulted in collapsing the number of those categories to 28.
In Phase 2 of the original TBC study, another set of undergraduates and a sample of Auburn
University faculty members selected the top 10 qualities/behaviors they judged to be key to
master teaching at the college and university level. Students and faculty agreed on 6 of the top
10 qualities/behaviors (although in different order): (a) realistic expectations, (b)
knowledgeable, (c) approachable/personable, (d) respectful, (e) creative/interesting, and (f)
enthusiasm. With respect to the four remaining items on which students and faculty did not
agree, there was an interesting, and as it turns out, generalizable difference between faculty
and student rankings. Faculty tended to emphasize specific elements related to teaching
technique (i.e., effective communication, prepared, current, and promoting critical thinking),
whereas students emphasized aspects of the student and teacher relationship (i.e.,
understanding, happy/positive/humorous, encouraging, flexible). Indeed, recent work has
found that perceived teacher-student rapport is one of the most important predictors of
student SETs (Richmond, Berglund, Epelbaum, & Klein, 2015). Thus, teachers and students
appear to share several similar views on behaviors reflective of master teaching but at the same
time show important differences in their perspectives on key elements of excellent teaching.
Factor Analysis of the TBC
Now that we had a scale, we needed to determine whether it was a valid and reliable
instrument. We conducted a factor analysis to examine the basic factor structure of the
instrument as well as measure its construct validity and internal reliability (Keeley et al., 2006).
Conversion to SET
To collect psychometric data on the TBC, we converted the instrument to an evaluative
inventory by adding a set of instructions and a 5-point Likert-type rating of the frequency of
exhibiting each quality ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (frequent). The instructions asked students
to rate their teacher on the extent to which they believed that their professor possessed each
the 28 teacher qualities and their attendant behaviors. Our sample of students completed the
TBC as well as the standard Auburn University end-of-the-semester eight-item teaching
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