Teaching Quality in Higher Education Agreement Between Teacher Self-Reports and Student Evaluations

Teaching quality is a crucial factor within higher education. Research on this topic often requires assessing teaching quality as a global construct through self-reports. However, such instruments are criticized due to the lack of alignment between teacher and student reports of instructional practices. We argue that while teachers might over- or under-estimate specific dimensions of teaching quality, the aggregation of these dimensions in the form of overarching teaching quality well reflects differences in teaching quality between teachers. Accordingly, we test a ten-item measure that allows faculty to self-report their teaching quality based on the aspects distinguished in the SEEQ (Marsh, 1982, 2007). Using 15,503 student assessments of teaching quality in 889 sessions taught by 97 faculty members, we conducted Doubly Latent Multi Level Modelling while considering bias and unfairness variables to model overarching teaching quality assessed by students, and simultaneously corrected for measurement error and potential distortions through the assessment situation. This global factor of teaching quality was strongly associated with teacher self-reported teaching quality (p = .74), which we interpret as evidence that global teacher reports of teaching quality can serve as sensible indicators of overarching teaching quality for nomothetic research in higher education.