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

evaluation. Items on the standard evaluation addressed teacher qualities including helpfulness,
organization and preparedness for the course, ability to motivate students and stimulate their
thinking, clarity of teaching, and whether the professor spoke audibly. Having students
complete both evaluations allowed us to have a standard of comparison for how the TBC
related to the Auburn University evaluation.
Factor Analysis Results
We submitted students’ ratings to a factor analysis, which produced two subscales: (a)
professional competency (11 items: approachable/personable, authoritative, confident,
effective communicator, good listener, happy/positive/humorous, knowledgeable, prepared,
punctuality/manages time, respectful, and technologically competent) and (b) caring and
supportive behaviors (13 items: accessible, encourages and cares for students, enthusiastic,
flexible/open-minded, humble, promotes class discussion, intellect stimulating, provides
constructive feedback, rapport, realistic expectations and grading, sensitive/persistent, strives
to be a better teacher, and understanding load on to the caring and supportive factor).
Our data derived from TBC student evaluations of four different instructors. We used two oneway
ANOVAs to compare these teachers in order to assess whether these subscales
discriminated among professors. For each subscale, we found significant differences among
professors that correlated well with students’ evaluations of these professors on the standard
Auburn University evaluation.
We found internal consistency to be .95 for the total of all items. The professional competency
subscale had a reliability coefficient of .90 and the caring and supportive subscale .93. We also
examined the test-retest reliability of the scale using a new set of data from another group of
different instructors and found that the total scale had a coefficient of .70 using midterm and
end-of-term comparisons. The two subscales were also strongly reliable with .68 for the caring
and supportive subscale and .72 for the professional competency subscale.
Thus, the TBC is a psychometrically sound and effective instrument for evaluating teaching
quality and in particular, for assessing teaching excellence. The strong psychometric properties
of the TBC along with its clear behavioral anchors allow teachers and others to diagnose and
remediate specific problems that may characterize one’s teaching.
The TBC as a Research Tool
Soon after we published our initial article on the TBC (Buskist et al., 2002), we and others began
examining the scale’s applicability for the study of excellence in teaching across different
institutional and cultural environments. At a liberal arts college and a community college,
faculty and students tended to agree on the top teaching qualities (Schaeffer, Epting, Zinn, &
Buskist, 2003; Wann, 2001). We found that students and faculty at both institutions rated six
qualities similarly (realistic expectations, knowledgeable, approachable, respectful,
creative/interesting, and enthusiastic). When comparing only the faculty from each institution,
we found agreement on seven of the top 10 qualities (the same six qualities as the combined
166