Students’ Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness: Satisfaction and Related Factors

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) has been widely studied in the past century and considerable research has been devoted to investigate its reliability, validity, and unbiasedness [7, 25]. Often, the overall goal of the evaluations is to gauge teaching effectiveness, understood as the extent to which a given learning objective is accomplished. Effectiveness can be evaluated through (i) direct assessment of knowledge and skills acquired by the students or (ii) a questionnaire designed to survey students’ opinion about the teaching styles and behaviours of teachers and/or their satisfaction [34]. Since there is no universally accepted strategy to achieve the measurements of effectiveness, students’ ratings are usually employed as a primary source of data as they are easier to collect than measurements of learned knowledge/skills. As a consequence, they represent the basis for measuring not only teaching effectiveness, but also active participation and students’ attitude toward academic activity, which are critical factors for the success of any teaching system. However, it is often claimed that students’ evaluations do not reveal true teaching performance and can only gauge the satisfaction with their instructors. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.