Student Perceptions of Faculty Instructional Value-added: a New Measure and Exploratory Empirical Evidence

Students react to two basic things when they are asked to rate a college course. Their ratings will reflect a certain response to the course content and to the method in which that content was delivered by a faculty person. We should expect that the resulting opinion of the teacher exists somewhat independent of the value that students perceive in the content of the courses that are taught. This paper defines this difference as a teacher’s instructional value-added. That some teachers are more successful than others in impressing students is difficult to deny. However, little is known about the nature of this increment. Using data from one school, the paper shows how instructional value-added perceived by students is distributed by discipline, by level, and by individual. Separate results are also provided for accounting classes. Suggestions for future research involving the instructional valueadded construct are made as part of our continuing effort to understand and evaluate post-secondary instruction.