Can student evaluation of a course and teacher be of benefit to the evaluating cohort: timing of evaluation in a rural-based institution of Higher Education

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-134-0_17How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Student course and teacher evaluation; higher education; pedagogy

Abstract

Lecturers are at the centre of all teaching and learning in Higher Education Institutions irrespective of the country and continent. For years now, student module and teachers’ evaluations have come at the end of every semester and the outcomes have been promising, but student performances remain a major debate. The key questions here are, who benefits from the feedback? Current cohort or future cohort? Does cohort vary in both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics? If timing is restructured, would it benefit or affect student perspective on evaluation? This study investigated the effect of timing (early September (SeptEV) and November (NovEV)) of student course and teacher’s evaluation on cohort benefit and evaluation perspectives. A third-year module (small class of 51 students) from the Department of Agriculture in a rural-based University was used. The evaluation was done midway and end of the semester through a questionnaire through Moodle. Feedback from the first questionnaire was used to improve teaching and learning prior second evaluation. The research was single-blinded to avoid bias in the second evaluation. The results indicated that students’ perspectives changed positively (P<0.05) towards learning, assessment, and teaching from SeptEV to NovEV. All 10 questions on course evaluation, 3 out of 5 for teacher evaluation, and 5 out of 5 on assessments all improved positively. The biggest improvements were observed in teachers’ evaluation; the pace of lecturing (38.2%), communication and explaining clearly (33.5%), and availability for consultation (22%) while for module evaluation multiple application of library resources (20.2%), appropriate technology enhancing learning (20.5%) and workload satisfaction (23.2%) all improved significantly. For assessments, fairness (29.8%), enough preparation time (18.9), timely feedback (18.6%) and relevances to course outcomes (5.2%) all improved (P<0.05) from SeptEV to NovEV. Timely evaluation if carefully designed may not only improve teaching and learning but also benefit the evaluating cohort.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - F. N. Fon
AU  - M. Sibanda
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/06
TI  - Can student evaluation of a course and teacher be of benefit to the evaluating cohort: timing of evaluation in a rural-based institution of Higher Education
BT  - Proceedings of the 10th Focus Conference (TFC 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 252
EP  - 267
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-134-0_17
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-134-0_17
ID  - Fon2023
ER  -