2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teaching evaluation in higher education is an essential practice that plays a pivotal role in ensuring the quality and effectiveness of academic instruction. It involves the systematic assessment of teaching methods, strategies, and their outcomes, allowing institutions to gauge the overall performance of educators and identify areas for improvement. This process allows educators to reflect on their teaching practices, adapt to evolving pedagogical trends, and ultimately enhance the learning experiences of their students. In the existing literature much is known about how teaching evaluations are conducted and their value in helping educators become better at their craft. However, there remains a gap in our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of how supervisors and peer evaluators make decisions about how to rate teaching beyond their own perceptions of teaching.
In this paper, we introduce the theory of rating (ToR) by Robert Wherry as a candidate theoretical framework for studying teaching evaluation. The ToR explains sources of error and bias in ratings and methods to minimize their impact. The ToR also demonstrates important aspects of rating scales and settings and talks about methods used to test the rating reliability and control bias. Although the ToR was developed in 1952 to account for all dimensions of rating/evaluation, it is not yet popular in studying teaching evaluation. Thus, we aim in this paper to widen our understanding of teaching evaluation dimensions by introducing and explaining the ToR along with its hypotheses then show how the theory has been applied in previous literature. Most importantly, we will show the adequacy of this theory to study teaching evaluation and suggest steps to improve the teaching evaluation process.