A Multilevel Longitudinal Analysis of Teaching Effectiveness Across Five Years

Author(s): Wang, Kairong | Advisor(s): Xu, Hongquan | Abstract: Students' rating of a professor's teaching effectiveness is widely endorsed by many schools to evaluate teacher's teaching quality. The purpose of applying this evaluation is to measure teaching effectiveness on a validated tool across teachers and subjects in the same school. It was expected that the ratings can help teachers on their continuous improvement in teaching and instructional decisions. However, do teachers become more effectively with experience growth? Previous studies found a relatively stable trend across time. The current research studies teaching effectiveness growth trajectory when teaching, to some extent, was related to teachers' performance review. Using five year's continuous data from 6383 courses taught by 1201 teachers from 25 departments in a university in China, this study fits a set of multivariate longitudinal models to examine trends and identify important predictors. Results find that across ten semesters in five years, there is an average increase rate of 0.029 points on a 5 points scale for each semester when all other factors are treated equally. Teachers' teaching experiences, academic ranking, and the class sizes they taught are all valid predictors to predict their teaching effectiveness. Besides, teachers are not growing in the same rate: those who have taught longer appear to have lower growth rate than those who have taught in short of period time. Teachers with higher academic ranks tend to have lower growth rate than those who have lower academic ranks.