Developing a Valid and Reliable Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) Instrument

tudent evaluations of teaching results have been sed as an indicator of course success and instructor erformance. Information obtained has been used to make ourse changes and improvements as well as to document nstructor performance for annual performance evaluation nd promotion and tenure packets. The purpose of this tudy was to develop a valid and reliable scale to assess tudent evaluation of teaching. The first phase of this study nvolved conceptualizing effective teaching. Effective eaching was operationalized with a Likert scale of 27 ndicators. Face and content validity were assessed by a anel of experts. In the second phase, reliability and imensionality were assessed. The target population was student enrolled in the College of Agriculture and Home Economics at New Mexico State University during the Fall 1997 semester. Inter-item consistency of the final summated scale of 27 indicators was determined with a Cronbachʹs alpha reliability of .97. Generalizability Theory was used to estimate the reliability for relative assessments on instructors or classes. Reliability assessments based on class size ranged from .80 to .96.