A retrospective
look at teacher quality assessment in British Universities
Ukraine’s entering into the
European educational environment has set new but rather ambiguous challenges in
respect of developing new ways of providing quality, teacher assessment,
measuring teacher effectiveness etc. all staff is rather vage for our
educational system, so needs careful study of existing practices abroad,
especially in UK. Falling within the scope of university management, the
present article intends to study the experience of British Universities in
implementing methods of quality measuring which further led to creating of
quality management and quality assurance system (QMS and QAS). British educational experts has passed a long way of probes
and mistakes to finally formalize practices into documents, recommendations or
regulations. So we suggest to study British experience
in order to escape possible mistakes on the way to implement QAS into HEI
practices of
It's a true fact that the
major concern of the British government at the moment is improving the quality
of teaching in HEIs and implementation of definite procedures and structures to
assure this quality. At the present survey we tried to analyze the efforts of
the British government undertaken for the last 20 years to implement definite
education policies targeted at improvement of teaching quality by means of
increasing teacher effectiveness and provide some hints for Ukrainian
university managers to utilize some of those practices in educational
establishments of
In a survey of staff training
and development activities in British universities, the Co-ordinating Committee
for the Training of University Teachers (A.Main 1975) asked Registrars
"whether there are any agreed criteria for the evaluation of teaching
staff who are being considered for senior posts".
In his review main stated that all the universities cited teaching as "an
important consideration" in terms of promotion, and two of them reported
the use of rating scales in evaluating teaching. One university said it applied
its scale to three items: quantity of teaching, quality of teaching, and
examining and responsibility for new courses. But
Measurement implies selection
of items to be measured, development or acquisition of adequate tools for
performing the measurements, and purpose for performing the act or
specification of use to which achieved results may be put. This is a positive
approach which, as in cutting a door or a length of dress material, anticipates
positive results in applying measurement to known or familiar tasks.
But measurement is also a
method of enquiry in areas unfamiliar or unknown. Sidney Kettle (1975) stated
his view that in the physical sciences, measurements taken in laboratory
situations do not prove theories or display truths, rather they identify faulty
or inadequate hypotheses and, within a particular system of enquiry, reduce the
number of possibilities by discovering those which are reputable. If one
accepts this as a premise, one may assume that the search for scientific truth
is an effort to reject ideas which are unworkable or unuseful and measurement
is the prime agent by which the necessary rejection is achieved. This may
appear to be an ungenerous view of modern science, but such a view is neither
novel nor lacking reputable support. T.S.Kuhn (1962) went much further in
stating, "Scientific revolutions ... (have) necessitated the community's
rejection of one time-honoured scientific theory in favour of another incompatible
with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for
scientific scrutiny and in the standard by which the profession determines what
should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem
solution".
The same view cannot be
lightly taken towards the act of measurement, methods of enquiry, systems of
belief, and their effects in terms of the social sciences. Being value
ourselves, human beings under scrutiny are not deemed to be expendable as are a
few atoms in a laboratory. Equally, there is concern about the effect upon
people of methods of investigation and the social consequences of theories,
attitudes and prevalent beliefs. We are all aware of dramatic examples like the
dangers surrounding theories of racial inferiority. But L.Hudson (1972)
discussed the matter more quietly: "....we could follow the example of
Heisenberg and the physicists; retain our concern for truth, but accept that
even the most disinterested attempts to measure the natural world are bound to
alter it - that, in our case, the assessments we attempt of other people may
influence them in profound and harmful ways. If we grant this, it follows -
again in Heisenberg's footsteps - that a knowledge of
such influence and the uncertainty it entails must become integral parts of our
discipline".
McNeil and Popham (1973)
comment on the role of traditional research:
"...investigators have shown a lack of balance by directing most of their inquiries toward development of schemes for analysing teaching and the conduct of studies that correlate process and product. ...we now need experiments showing that the teacher's use of these (instructional) variables can indeed produce predicted effects in learners. ...evidence cited in this chapter suggests that practice has been seriously weakened by the false belief that there are scientific c onclusions which correspond to good teaching".
Of course traditional research
has been supplemented by newer approaches. In
"Essentially they (Hildebrand and Wilson 1970) are saying two things, we do not agree on criteria of learning or how to measure it; the learner (therefore) is the best judge of whether he has learned. Unfortunately, however, one can't prove the latter until he has done the former".
K.E.Pole (1970) pointed to
some of the problems in interpreting student opinion before resorting to factor
analysis: these which take effect in the teaching/learning situation and
impinge on every effort to identify educational truths. The closest we can come
to understanding is by observing human beings in sufficient numbers to detect
patterns in mass behaviour, postulate causal factors and measure the constancy
of correlations, and attempt to calculate probabilities concerning the
individual. L.C.Taylor (1971) put the whole matter rather better than we can
and we quote him at length:
"...statistical
statements, however subtle, involve telling lies about a series of real
exceptions in order to encompass some abstract rule".
Having indicated certain
difficulties concerning the process of measurement itself,
perhaps it is an appropriate point at which to return to our original premise
that measurement implies selection of items to be measured, development of
appropriate tools, and specified use of results. Me
have to consider each of these in turn and apply them to the question of
assessing teaching effectiveness.
Bibliography:
1.
Korn J.H.
(1972) Promoting Good Teaching Journal of Higher Education XLIII (2).
2.
Kuhn T.S.
(1962) The Structure of Scientific
3.
Main A.
(April. 1975) The Training of University Teachers:
Developments in
4.
Kuhn T.S.
(1962) The Structure of Scientific
5.
Kuhn T.S.
(1962) The Structure of Scientific