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Teaching and unit evaluations surveys are used to assess the quality of teaching and the quality of the unit of study. An analysis of teaching and unit evaluation survey practices in Australian universities suggests significant changes. One key change discussed in the paper is the shift from voluntary to mandatory use of surveys with the results used to assess and reward academic staff performance. The change in the direction is largely driven by the introduction of performance‐based funding as part of quality assurance arrangements. The paper aims to outline the current trends and changes and the implications in the future such as increased scrutiny of teaching and intrusion to academic autonomy.

The paper is based on the analysis of current teaching and unit evaluation practices across the Australian university sector. The paper presents the case of an Australian university that has introduced performance‐based reward using various measures to assess and reward academic staff such as the outcome of student satisfaction surveys. The analysis of external quality audit findings related to teacher and unit evaluations is also presented.

The findings suggest a shift in trend from the use of voluntary to mandatory tools to assess and reward quality teaching. The case of an Australian university outlined in the paper and the approach taken by seven other universities is largely driven by performance‐based funding. One of the key concerns for many in higher education is the intrusion of academic autonomy with increased focus on outcomes and less emphasis on resources needed to produce excellence in learning and teaching and research. The increased reliance on student happiness as a measure of educational quality raises the questions on whether high student satisfaction would strengthen academic rigour and student attainment of learning outcomes and generic skills which are seen as key factors in graduate exit standards.

The renewal of quality assurance and performance‐based funding using student satisfaction as a measure of educational quality will result in increased use of student voice to assess learning and teaching outcomes. Such direction will increase the accountability on academics to improve student experience and the measures will be used to assess academic staff performance.

The paper outlines the trends and changes in the teacher and unit evaluations in Australian universities and its implications in the future. The paper also provides a case of an Australian university that has recently made teacher and unit evaluations compulsory with the results used in academic staff annual performance review and linking reward with performance outcomes.

The quality of teaching across the world is often defined by students’ academic achievement. Yet, teaching and learning is a complex phenomenon. Standards and policy documents, internationally and within India, specify knowledge and skills for teachers. A variety of evaluation tools exist to measure teaching performance. The authors describe a Teacher Performance Review Process (TPRP) using a diagnostic tool internationally benchmarked and contextualized for India. Initially, 408 teachers from 10 schools completed the TPRP, with 95 teachers from 3 schools completing two cycles of TPRP. The TPRP incorporated multiple sources of evidence for rating each teacher on 27 performance indicators using a four-point scale. Rating frequencies were analyzed and results reported for an initial and second cycle of TPRP. Feedback from teachers and school leaders indicated this process supported improving the quality of teaching. TPRP, implemented as a cyclical process capturing evidence from multiple sources over time, potentially provides comprehensive documentation of the complex phenomenon of teaching performance, and supports teachers in continuous improvement.

In this paper, the author extends the current research on standardized performance assessments in preservice education by moving with novice teachers from their student teaching experiences into their first years as fully certified classroom teachers. Here, the author draws on scholarship that conceptualizes literacies as performative (Alexander, 2005; Youdell, 2010) to examine how engaging in a standardized performance assessment process shaped the teaching identities that participants carried into their first years of teaching in the field.

Through a qualitative case study, the author investigates the experiences of a group of six novice elementary educators in their first years in the classroom after completing the standardized performance assessment Educative Performance Assessment as a major component of their certification program. Data, which included focus group and individual interviews and artifacts (instructional handouts, teaching videos, lesson plans, written reflective commentaries), were analyzed through a performance lens.

Findings highlight how engaging with a standardized performance assessment shaped the meanings that participants made of their teaching practices, including lesson planning and implementation for and with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

This paper offers insights that can support teacher educators working toward preparing teachers for work with diverse students in public school classrooms that might produce more equitable policies, practices and transformative reforms, particularly for historically marginalized groups.

Based on the traditional conception of teacher effectiveness, proposes three strategies for improving it: short‐term, long‐term and dynamic strategies. Argues that the dynamic strategy is preferable, but that all of them have strong limitations because they ignore the complexity of teacher effectiveness and narrow the concept to the individual teacher, particularly in a classroom context. Proposes a new conceptual framework of total teacher effectiveness, whereby the total quality of the teacher competence layer contributes to the total quality of the teacher performance layer and the latter contributes to the total quality of the student learning experience layer and then to the quality of the student learning outcomes layer. Explains that the framework suggests a holistic approach to improving teacher effectiveness with the emphasis on the improvement of whole layers of teacher competence and performance instead of fragmentary improvement of teaching behaviour. Advises that in order to ensure total layer quality and maximize teacher effectiveness, a congruence development cycle should be established within the teacher layers to ensure congruence and pursue total teacher effectiveness. Suggests that the proposed conceptual framework can provide a new direction for studying and improving teacher effectiveness in particular and school effectiveness in general.

This research is about embedding service-based supply chain management (SCM) concepts in the education sector. Due to Canada's competitive education sector, the authors focus on Canadian universities.

The authors develop a framework for evaluating and forecasting university performance using data envelopment analysis (DEA) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to assist education policymakers. The application of the proposed framework is illustrated based on information from 16 Canadian universities and by investigating their teaching and research performance.

The major findings are (1) applying the service SCM concept to develop a performance evaluation and prediction framework, (2) demonstrating the application of DEA-ANN for computing and predicting the efficiency of service SCM in Canadian universities, and (3) generating insights to enable universities to improve their research and teaching performances considering critical inputs and outputs.

This paper presents a new framework for universities' performance assessment and performance prediction. DEA and ANN are integrated to aid decision-makers in evaluating the performances of universities.

The findings suggest that higher education policymakers should monitor attrition rates at graduate and undergraduate levels and provide financial support to facilitate research and concentrate on Ph.D. programs. Additionally, the sensitivity analysis indicates that selecting inputs and outputs is critical in determining university rankings.

This research proposes a new integrated DEA and ANN framework to assess and forecast future teaching and research efficiencies applying the service supply chain concept. The findings offer policymakers insights such as paying close attention to the attrition rates of undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In addition, prioritizing internal research support and concentrating on Ph.D. programs is recommended.

This study explored the effect of mathematics teaching quality on mathematics achievement among undergraduate students, using the SERVQUAL model.

The sample comprised of 320 first-year undergraduate students of a public university in Ghana. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was run in Amos (v.23) to test the various hypotheses.

The study concluded that the tangible aspect of the SERVQUAL model (service quality), which is very instrument in some service industries such as the airline, had no significant effect on mathematics achievement. Mathematics teaching reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy, however, had significant positive effects on mathematics achievement among undergraduate students.

The study assessed the effects of the individual dimensions of SERVQUAL on mathematics achievement, and it was realized that the tangible dimension had no significant effect. Tangibles may however compliment the other dimensions and is therefore imperative to also assess the effect of service quality (as a higher/second order variable) with the five dimensions as its first-order variables.

Human resources (lecturers) were seen as a strategic tool in enhancing students' academic performance and mathematics performance to be specific. Management of universities is therefore expected to invest in building, training and developing their human resources for an enhanced academic performance of students, especially in mathematics.

Although some past studies have applied SERVQUAL to teaching and learning researches, attention was largely focused on the measurement or assessment of teaching quality using SERVQUAL, with little attention on the effect of SERVQUAL on an outcome variable.

Public universities worldwide are under growing pressure to increase efficiency. Understanding how teaching and research contribute to the overall efficiency of university operations is of great importance for universities to improve their performance. This paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper adopts a holistic approach to evaluate university efficiency from three perspectives including overall university operations efficiency, university teaching efficiency and university research efficiency. It applies the technique of data envelopment analysis to 36 Australian universities during the period 2011–2015 to evaluate their relative efficiency from these three perspectives. A strategic group analysis is further conducted for exploring the source of inefficiency of an individual university in its respective strategic group.

This study reveals that Australian universities maintain a comparatively high level of efficiency in terms of overall operations and research during the period 2011–2015. Teaching efficiency, however, is underwhelming during this period. It further shows that universities with low efficiency seeking to improve their overall operations efficiency can allocate the limited resource to teaching instead of research.

This study is crucial to both Australian government and Australian universities. The government is provided with the information about the optimum performance levels for universities under certain fixed resource. As a result, resources or funding can be allocated based on the performance ranking. The efficiency information is also in demand among Australian universities. In order to successfully strive for more funding from the federal government in an environment of increased competition, universities need to not only know their relative position among their peers, but also get guidelines on how to improve their performance.

The novelty of this study lies in the decomposing of efficiency models to identify inefficiencies in university operations. Such a study provides individual universities with valuable information on how they can make full use of their resources to improve their efficiency in an increasingly competitive environment.

The purpose of this paper is to create a key performance indicator (KPI) that can be used as the benchmark tool for teaching performance and practices of both excellent teachers (ETs) and non-ETs and to investigate the possible interrelationships between the five thinking domains (teachers’ teaching philosophy, teaching objective, pedagogical content knowledge, teachers’ expectations and management style).

This study uses a quantitative approach with a sample of 306 ETs from eight states including the Federal Territory. Exploratory factor analysis was used to validate the instrument and confirmatory factor analysis for model fit.

The findings showed that an excellent classroom management style was the most significant domain for KPI with the highest factor loading, followed by ETs’ teaching philosophy and objectives. It revealed that there was no significant relationship between ETs’ expectations and their classroom management style and that the relationships between the other domains were weak.

With this research creating a KPI model for excellent teaching practices, it is suggested that an in-depth review should be conducted concerning the standardization of the classroom management and the national teaching objectives in Malaysia. Perhaps representatives from the Ministry of Education and the school principals could go into the field to determine whether the excellent and non-ETs are fulfilling the national education objectives and meeting the expectations. This could lead to setting KPIs for achieving teaching objectives among the ETs.

To provide a best practice framework for peer review via teaching observation as a method of appraising teaching performance within UK higher education (HE) institutions.

The paper uses secondary data analysis via the current literature on peer review and peer appraisal, as well as use of primary data obtained via the design, implementation and analysis of semi‐structured interviews with management and teaching staff within the Faculty of Business and Management Science within a fictitiously named Riverbank University.

Provides a best practice framework for peer review based on the literature, where the case study university benchmarks well against the framework and an insight into the perceptions of teaching staff on the scheme.

The sample of 40 teaching staff was from only one faculty, in one university. Before generalising the findings it would be prudent to widen the research to include a larger sample from more universities across the HE sector in the UK.

The research has massive implications for the UK HE sector if peer review is to be used as a method of assessing teaching performance.

The paper is valuable as a guide to senior management wishing to implement a peer observation scheme within their own institution.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what key competencies and characteristics of teachers are needed for integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teaching and to investigate teachers’ perceptions on how important those competencies are and how often they are executed.

An exploratory sequential mixed methods approach was used to investigate key characteristics of integrated STEM teaching competencies and the level of their importance and performance as perceived by teachers. By using behavioral event interview technique, qualitative data were collected from professional secondary teachers in science, math and technology subjects. An instrument was constructed based on the result of qualitative research; and a survey was conducted with 48 STEM teachers working in South Korea. The mean values between importance and performance of integrated STEM teaching competencies were compared. A perceived importance level of each item was compared with a practice level by using importance-performance analysis.

As a result of qualitative research, in total 21 items were constructed as detailed characteristics of each domain of integrated STEM teaching competencies, which provide insights about teachers’ perceptions of teaching competencies that are critical for integrated STEM education. A comparison of means between importance and performance of integrated STEM teaching competencies showed that whereas teachers considered each of these items to be of significant importance in their overall evaluation of the integrated STEM teaching competencies, they are not performing at a level that reflects the assigned importance.

This research results provide information for future research on how to implement an integrated STEM education initiative at the secondary school level, for planning teacher training programs, pre-service teacher education and related educational policies.

South Korea has focused on integrated STEM education to raise talented human resources in the fields of science and technology. However, many teachers have experienced serious difficulties and troubles in executing integrated STEM education. It is necessary to figure out key competencies and characteristics of teachers to facilitate integrated STEM teaching.