Modeling Students' Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract

A Brunswik lens experiment was designed to model the weighting scheme used by psychology students to evaluate teaching effectiveness on eight classroom jobs. Separate samples of students numbering 17 and 18 and drawn from two cultures made actual and simulated ratings of teaching effectiveness. Similarly, 16 teachers representing 16 psychology classrooms from two cultures estimated the percent of total time they used to execute each of eight classroom teaching jobs. The percentages assigned for the execution of the eight teaching jobs were incorporated as cues in a regression-prediction model to predict ratings of teaching effectiveness. Based on acceptable validities, the techniques and job-cue interrelationships demonstrated here may be generalized by students to college level psychology departments to sharpen their students' ratings of classroom teaching.