All things considered, what aspects of a staff member's professional repertoire are related to their overall effectiveness as a university teacher?

Roberta Martin and Julie Arthur, The University of Queensland, Queensland

The evaluation of the effectiveness of learning and teaching in higher education in universities in Australia has traditionally been an area fraught with tensions. Student surveys were introduced in Australian universities in the early 1990s and until the introduction of the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund (LTPF), information collected was, in most cases, only provided to staff members with a view to improving the quality of teaching of subjects or programs. Institutional surveys have a standard set of items related to various aspects of the teaching and learning experience with a final item rating the academic staff member. This research, which involved statistical analysis of aggregated data, investigated which of the standard items were most related to the overall ranking assigned to staff members by the student survey cohort. At an individual level the findings guide academic staff to target improvements in areas most strongly related to the overall satisfaction ranking. At the institutional level, the results lead the way for an evidence-based approach to academic staff development, policy development and the implementation of strategic initiatives in the scholarship of learning and teaching. This paper reflects on the challenges of quality assurance and enhancement of learning and teaching. Formal accountability processes and academic engagement with student feedback are explored. Furthermore the paper discusses the implications of the elevation and adoption of student data as a quality measure of corporate performance, given the diversity of the learning and teaching provision across faculties and programs.