Abstract:
The main objective was to develop a practical diagnostic observation and reporting system for student description of college teaching. At Cornell University 120 professors participated in identifying 7 general teaching objectives considered satisfactory for describing most of the important purposes of undergraduate courses. In addition, data were collected from 402 instructors and 12,792 students at ten colleges of agriculture in the Northeast to determine the correlations between the presence of 45 low-inference teaching behaviors and the degree of student achievement as measured by students' ratings of their progress on each of the 7 general teaching objectives used in the study.
The findings show that 28 specific, low-inference, observable teaching behaviors correlated at the level of .48 or higher with student achievement on one or more of the general teaching objectives and were classified by the researchers as effective at the college level.
Four main products were generated by the study: an Instructor Form, a Student Form, a computer Instructor's Printout, and the required computer programs for use in processing the data on standard electronic equipment. Administrators and professors interested in the improvement of college teaching will find these products to have implications for meaningful staff development programs. Similarily, researchers seeking to validate competencies for inclusion in a competency-based teacher preparation program will find the rationale and methodology used in this study of benefit.
Keywords:
reporting system, staff development programs
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