Investigating current approaches to assessing teaching evaluation in engineering departments

The nature of teaching evaluation is, more often than not, determined primarily by the results of surveys based on students' evaluation and, sometimes, peer evaluation ratings. However, previous work has highlighted that in most cases student evaluation surveys are the main and/or only method used to evaluate teaching. This led to the critique of using student evaluation surveys as insufficient as a stand-alone method of evaluating teaching. These criticisms are based on the fact that instruments designed for students to evaluate teaching commonly consist of the same set of generic closed-ended questions and lack the ability to appropriately judge the multi-dimensional nature of teaching and learning. Additionally, the focus of teaching evaluation is theorized to differ based on the type of institution (which are doctoral universities, baccalaureate and associate colleges). With this in mind, this study seeks to explore current approaches to evaluate teaching in engineering departments. Based on the call for multiple approaches to evaluating teaching in higher education this research seeks to answer the following questions “what are the current approaches to assessing teaching evaluation and how are these approaches similar or different based on institution type?” As part of a larger study, this paper will describe the teaching evaluation practices within three types of institutions aforementioned. The goal of this study is to provide stakeholders with a repository of teaching evaluation practices. The authors also posit that having a broad spectrum of teaching evaluation approaches is highly valuable in improving teaching and student learning in the engineering community.