Evaluating teaching and learning Prof Sarah Moore

Group 1  What is high quality teaching?  What are the factors that give rise to high quality teaching? Group 2  What is high quality learning?  What are the factors that give rise to high quality learning?

What is educational success? How do we know if teachers have been successful? How do we know if educational institutions have been successful? What are the key ingredients of educational success?

Goals to do with expertise and competence Competent, accomplished in a specific range of skills Informed, knowledgeable, capable Up to date, cognitively able Proven abilities within a stated and explicit domain of expertise

Goals to do with demeanour, orientation, attitudes, general competencies Learners become critical thinkers? Learners have become motivated to use knowledge to make the world a better place? Learners are fluent, comfortable talking to and dealing with people from many backgrounds and cultures Able to work in teams? Persistent in the face of failure, able to build on success?

Goals to do with demeanour, orientation, attitudes, general competencies Learners become critical thinkers? Learners have become motivated to use knowledge to make the world a better place? Learners are fluent, comfortable talking to and dealing with people from many backgrounds and cultures Able to work in teams? Persistent in the face of failure, able to build on success?

All of these are difficult to measure, some are extremely qualitative, many involve the development of multilayered capabilities that the curriculum tries to capture, but the whole experience is delivered in chunks by different teachers in different ways using different measures of achievement not necessarily with huge commitment to integration.

Typical proxies for teaching and learning quality in the face of this complexity and fragmentation Retention, persistence, progression Award classification Employment rates/ progression to further study Qualifications of teachers, class size All useful but not as ends in themselves

Institutional dialogue about what matters Graduate attributes: across all domains what are the characteristics and qualities that we want for our graduates? Why are these important? Wide range of stakeholders to participate in this dabate: e.g. UL – Knowledgable, Collaborative, Proactive, Creative, Responsible, Articulate.

Importance of professional development for teachers In the absence of strong support for the development of teachers in higher education, quality frameworks can be weaker and less effective than they should be.

Features of a comprehensive, fine grained evaluation Student evaluations Module evaluations Average grades, peformance Peer observation and feedback Class observation Curriculum analysis Experience analysis Evaluation of assessment strategies Longer term feedback Constructive alignment Threshold concepts 360 – self, peer, student, pedagogical expert, disciplinary expert.

Levels of analysis Global Societal Sectoral Institutional Group Individual Programme Module