What Distinguishes a Distinction: The Eyes of the Beholder and Beholdee (original) (raw)
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Pressures to enhance the quality of university teaching have led to increased emphasis on recognising and rewarding good teaching practice in England. Institutional awards for teaching excellence have grown in response to this agenda. This paper is based on a project that investigates the teaching experience of Teaching Excellence Award winners at a post‐1992 university in England. It draws predominantly on interviews with these Award winners and their students, exploring their varied conceptions of ‘quality’ and ‘quality enhancement’. The research reveals that most of the Award winners associated the concept of quality with transformative learning. However, students, while recognising the concept, defined quality in more instrumental terms. They tended to relate quality to academic teaching practice and its impact on their learning outcomes, rather than their own learning experience.
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In the United Kingdom’s (UK) higher education system, teaching and learning are currently under review to evaluate both social and individual investment to tertiary education. The UK government introduced the Teaching Excellence Framework and Student Outcomes Framework to assess the quality of undergraduate teaching in universities and other higher education providers. There are 14 research projects which are identifying multiple ways to measure Learning Gain, a key component of the Teaching Excellence Framework and Student Outcomes Framework. Teaching Excellence encompasses Teaching Quality, the Learning Environment as well as Student Outcomes and Learning Gain, it uses both core metrics and a narrative to evaluate individual universities performance. Current research evaluate methodologies to measure Learning Gain and determine the potential suitability and scalability of possible measures across the sector. This paper describes the current state of policy and research against the...
The action research project, which is to be reported, comes from a series of questions based on feedback strategies and is re-interpreted to show how these processes can help students to become self-regulated learners. This reformulation is used to identify the principles of good feedback and address the issue of how students should have a proactive role in generating and using feedback, while providing information on students' achievement levels focusing on their learning performance through a snapshot of activities with second-year undergraduate students. Combined with this activity, students already judge the quality of their own work followed by opportunities to generate their own feedback. The study attempts to advance the understanding of how assessment and feedback are shaped by this students' ability and how the profound implications indicate that lecturers should consider the way they organize assessments and support learning.
2015
ABSTRACT Within the Review parameter of the ADRI cycle , course/teacher evaluations have an important function as to student feedback and teaching/learning improvement. Student feedback in form of formal questionnaires has become a standard tool used by institutions of higher education and automation software platforms’ or management systems are used to collect data for review and quality assurance. Whereas these instruments form a relevant element in quality assurance at the institutional level and provide comparable long-term data, they also suffer from a lack of qualitative depth. As a teacher with years of experience and a former head of department, I have come to appreciate results of formal course/teacher evaluations for what they are - indicators – for a number of factors influencing the course/teaching/learning situation. Certainly, clear negative feedback on teaching skills or attitude need to be addressed at an individual level using supportive measures and currently, as a coordinator and lecturer in a Masters teacher training program for German as a Foreign Language at the German Jordanian University, I guide my master students to reflective thinking in order to enhance their quality learning and consequently their quality teaching skills. Furthermore, I also encourage my students to consider looking beyond critical or negative feedback apparently directed at the course or themselves as a teacher, as this quite often conceals other underlying factors that should be taken into consideration within a view of “a wider picture”. Introducing an example from a period of uncertainty about the efficiency and the necessity of German language courses at the German University of Technology in Oman (between 2009 – 2012) incited by formal course/teacher evaluation feedback an insight is given into the approach adapted at that time which illustrates a good practice example for the enhancement of an institutional culture of quality. Key Words: Oman, German language, culture of quality, bottom-up approach, course/teacher evaluation, good practice