Students’ views towards teachers evaluation , Ahwaz Medical Sciences University

Introduction. In educational centers, evaluation of educational activities of teachers is done in different ways. One of the most common ways » nearly in all important universities « is student Evaluation of teaching (SET), which is done by questionnaires. Scientific evidences have showed that in spite of frequent usage of this kind of evaluation, opinions of students about teacher’s performance is influenced by some factors which are relevant or irrelevant to evaluation. The purposes of this study were determining the students’ views toward SET and priority and importance of factors which they refer. Methods. A questionnaire consisted of 64 closed questions with 5 scales from 1(not at all) to 5 (very much ) was delivered to 561 students. 423 questionnaires were collected (return rate 75.5%). The data was entered in SPSS and frequency, percent, mean, and Chi- square, student T test, Tukey method and pearson correlation were used to analyze the data. Results. According to the calculated means, educational behavior, academic and personal characteristics of teachers, evaluation process and students characteristics had priority, respectively. The numerical mean was higher (4.05) in educational behavior than their academic and personal characteristics. (i.e. educational behavior were more important for the students), while students characteristics had the least importance in evaluation of teachers (mean=3.45). The students considered the university evaluations “favorite” (mean=3.73) .In answering to question about their honesty, the students declared that feedbacks of SET were valid (4.08) but they believed that the university authorities had not paid attention to feedback of SET (3.45). Conclusion. Student's opinions toward SET are optimal and therefore the university authorities should manage to improve the quality of these evaluations and better usage of results. They should take the optimal teacher characteristic through the students' opinions and finally give a proper feedback to the teachers and help to improve learning and teaching qualities.