Assessing the Quality of University Teaching. (January 13, 2009)

The eminent experimental embryologist, Victor Twitty, was executive head of biological sciences at Stanford University from 1948 until 1963. Aside from being recognised as an exceptional researcher he was a fine teacher attested to by both colleagues and students (undergraduates, graduates and postdocs). Perhaps that should be qualified to "the better undergraduates".

One day following his lecture to a class of third-year undergraduates, he noticed that one of the students had left his class notes behind and Twitty began to thumb through them, first with interest and then with increasing agitation.

I'm sure I didn't say that..

I couldn't have said that..

That's nonsense..

And after another three minutes he gave up in exasperation and took the notes to the departmental secretary to return to the student.

The Nobel laureate geneticist HJ Muller was incomprehensible to first year undergraduates but a brilliant and stimulating instructor and mentor to the best of graduate students.

This is simply to introduce the matter of the federal government determining standardised protocols to assess the quality of teaching at universities.

Rod Beecham, an independent education adviser, writing in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement today sums up his assessment of university administration's attempts to gauge the quality of teaching: "But, of course, the purpose of the instrument is not to measure educational content at all; it is to measure the level of customer satisfaction. The institution wants to ensure that present and recent students don't tell off-putting stories to potential future students... The federal government seeks to yoke the Australian higher education sector to the country's perceived socioeconomic needs. But there is no accurate measurement of the sector's performance in this regard." And then: "Of course, if export revenue is the ultimate measure, it doesn't matter if we don't teach anyone anything as long as there is a steady demand for Australian degree certificates."

In the same issue of the broadsheet Andrew Trounson looks into just how the federal government is going about this management issue.

Mr Trounson reports that the proposal to use the proportion of staff holding a graduate certificate in higher education as a quality proxy has been heavily criticised.

"We have no clear evidence that completing these certificates increases the quality of teaching or learning," Deakin University's director of higher education research Marcia Devlin told the HES.

Griffith University's higher education analyst Gavin Moodie made the observation that although he backed moves to increase the participation low SES students, he considered it irrelevant to teaching quality. He has similar concerns, he told Mr Trounson, over using student retention and progression to measure teaching performance.

Furthermore, he said a proposal to measure learning outcomes through wider use of the graduate skills assessment test was useless because the test measures generic skills that depend too much on abilities that students already have when they come into university.

A suggestion put forward by Professor Vin Massaro and "seconded" by Gavin Moodie was that the government consider introducing a form of peer review in assessing course quality. After all peer review is already relied on in assessing research performance Dr Moodie told Andrew Trounson.

Finally, Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor and Universities Australia chairman Peter Coaldrake believes: "It isn't territory we should shy away from, but we need to spend the time to get the measures right and be realistic about what can be achieved."

Just what those measures are to be wasn't territory Professor Coaldrake ventured into.

If we might make a suggestion, perhaps start with the requirement that instructors should know, understand and have an interest in their subject(s).