Has teaching improved? It’s a question I’ve been putting to myself here on the backside of a long career. Without beginning benchmarks it’s hard to say for sure, maybe a bit, but not as much as it could or should. My feelings were reinforced by a “Faculty Forum” recently published in Teaching of Psychology: “We argue that psychology as a discipline continues to neither prioritize nor value the development of effective teaching and the advancement of effective teaching as it should,” (p. 239). The issues the eight authors identify as needing to be addressed in psychology apply to the practice of teaching, dare I say, in every field.
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I whole-heartedly agree with the points above, and would add one more. Assessing teaching effectiveness requires that we have not only an agreed-upon definition of what that effectiveness entails, but we also need a reliable and accurate way to evaluate learning in our students. Obviously, the two most often used means of evaluating teaching , course marks and student evaluations, are inadequate.