Dimensions of Effective Teaching: Factors or Artifacts

Abstract

A current concern in evaluating faculty from student rating data has been to identify dimensions of teaching behaviors. Although recent studies have identified factors which are highly stable across different groups of teachers and students, the specific type of data underlying the factor analyses may have yielded dimensions which are implicit in the student raters rather than the teachers. In the present study, although the factor structures of rating items were found to be highly congruent over different subject matters and teaching roles, the factors were also highly related to students' implicit categories of teaching behaviors. The meaning of these results is discussed by considering the potential influences of rater's implicit theories on the different types of rating data which can be factor analyzed.