A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

14
Evaluating courses
and teaching
Dai Hounsell
Evaluation is a way of understanding the effects of our teaching on students’ learning.
It implies collecting information about our work, interpreting the information and
making judgements about which actions we should take to improve practice. . . .
Evaluation is an analytical process that is intrinsic to good teaching.
(Ramsden, 1992: 209)
INTRODUCTION
It is almost 40 years since the publication of The Assessment of University Teaching (Falk and
Dow, 1971), the first book of its kind to appear in Britain. Initially, the very idea that
teaching in higher education might be evaluated proved highly controversial. Some
academics considered it an affront to their academic autonomy, while others viewed it as
needless kowtowing to student opinion. Nowadays, evaluation raises very few eyebrows.
It is widely seen not only as a necessary step towards accountability, but also as an integral
part of good professional practice and the systematic development of teaching expertise.
From this contemporary standpoint, excellence in teaching and learning is not simply
the product of experience. It depends on the regular monitoring of teaching performance
to pinpoint achievements, build on strengths, and identify areas where there is scope for
improvement.
Alongside acceptance of the indispensability of evaluation have come sharper
differentiation of purposes and, accompanying that shift, greater methodological
sophistication. For many years, approaches to evaluation were strongly influenced by
practices in the USA, where standardised student ratings questionnaires had been
developed chiefly for summative purposes: to compare the teaching performance of
different individuals in making decisions about tenure and promotion (D’Andrea and
Gosling, 2005). But in universities in the UK and Australasia, evaluation purposes have
predominantly been formative and developmental (i.e. to enhance quality), and the focus
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