Teaching development grants final and financial report: Development of a new instrument for student evaluation of teaching (SET)

Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) is an important institutional exercise. It serves both formative and summative purposes of the Institute in teaching. On the one hand, the exercise provides data for teaching staff and their supervisors to gain understanding on staff teaching performance and make continuous improvement in module teaching. On the other hand, the SET data are also used in high-stake personnel decisions. After a preliminary review of the SET working group, it was agreed that the current SET questionnaire which was originally designed for the purposes of both module evaluation and teaching evaluation is not suitable for evaluating staff teaching performance particularly relating to high stake personnel decisions. With the endorsement and support of the Academic Quality Assurance Committee (AQAC), the working group recently decided to develop a new SET questionnaire that can provide a more reliable, valid and proper instrument with focus mainly on teaching evaluation instead of module evaluation to serve both the formative and summative purposes at the individual and other levels. Both the SET working group and AQAC agreed that the development of such a new SET instrument should be academically rigorous as well as involving participation and input of various stakeholders including staff members, students and concerned academic units in the whole process. It is important to establish widely the credibility of the SET instrument as well as the culture of using SET for continuous improvement in teaching through wide consultation and discussion among staff member and students at different stages of development. This new instrument will be subject to rigorous psychometric analysis which allows us to develop benchmarks for good teaching performance. It will also be a reliable, valid and transparent scale to inform the Senior Management in making personnel decisions.