The Use of Global and Specific Items in Evaluating Teaching in a Teaching Assistant Training Program
The purpose of this study was to determine if making specific changes in teaching, changes that were validated by experts, would change the overall ratings of instructors. In a previous study thirty-seven graduate teaching assistants participated in a workshop on improving lecturing skills. The teaching assistants were divided into treatment and control groups with the treatment group viewing a model videotape. When pre/post videotapes of these teaching assistants were evaluated by experts on ten specific lecturing behaviors, the teaching assistants in the treatment group improved their final scores significantly more than the teaching assistants in the control group. Thirty sets of videotape data were used in this study. Eighteen undergraduate education students were hired to watch and rate the sixty videotapes on six evaluative items, including: a global item, rate the instructor's overall teaching ability and a warmth item. An analysis of covariance was carried out on the experts' ratings and it was determined that teaching assistants in the treatment group had improved significantly more than teaching assistants in the control group on the post composite score of their lecturing behaviors. When an analysis of covariance was carried out on the students' global rating of these same instructors, there was no significant difference between the post score for the treatment and control group. Additionally t-tests of the expert ratings found a significant difference pre/post for all teaching assistants as a result of the lecturing workshop. A t-test for the student global ratings indicated that there was no significant difference between pre/post global ratings. Chi-square analysis indicated there was no relationship between the changes in global and the changes in specific ratings. Furthermore the improvement on global and improvement on specific ratings seemed independent of whether the instructors were rated as higher or lower on the warmth factor. The data seem to support the notion that while specific skills can be changed through intervention, the overall impressions that students have of their instructors do not necessarily also improve.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign