Integrating Usability into the Design of Student Ratings of Teachers: The Teaching and Instructional Measure of Effectiveness (TIME)

Abstract

At most universities, students are required to complete end-of-semester teacher evaluation forms, which may have undesirable effects on teacher ratings to the extent that students feel inconvenienced, annoyed, or disinterested when completing these forms. Addressing these concerns, we designed the Teaching and Instructional Measure of Effectiveness (TIME), a brief 6-item measure that captures relevant aspects of teaching effectiveness while retaining high levels of usability. The TIME was piloted in a small set of undergraduate psychology courses (k = 22 classrooms, cumulative N = 640 students). Students perceived the usability of the TIME to be good-to-exceptional; and overall, students indicated that the TIME was better than the teaching evaluation system currently employed by the university. Moreover, the TIME correlated very highly with the existing teaching evaluation form, but with fewer items and less time to complete. Together, these results suggest the TIME can reliably yet more conveniently reflect student ratings of teacher performance. Future research on the psychometric properties of the TIME can usefully expand from the current work by involving multiple universities, more disciplines, more diverse classrooms, and a wider range of institutional teaching evaluation forms.