Improving university teaching: what Brazilian students say about their teachers

The major purpose of the research reported here was to gather, analyze and interpret the opinions about effective university teachers held by 392 students randomly selected from each of the populations of students attending the Schools of Nursing, Dentistry and Medicine at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. A 72-item scale was developed based upon a review of the literature on effective teaching and qualitative information collected through an open-ended instrument given to 175 students attending the same schools but not a part of the final randomly selected samples. The final scale asked students to bear in mind a particular teacher they judged effective and to indicate on a Likert 5-point scale the degree to which that teacher exhibited the behaviors and/or attributes proposed by each of the 72 items.