Study of the qualities of a good University lecturer of Health Sciences

This paper studies the qualities desirable in university professors from the students' perspective. Most of the investigations forget the main actor: the student. So, qualities such as closeness, interaction, etc. are neglected by the evaluators and demanded by college students. In order to know what qualities students value, we used a variation of the Thurstone method known as the Law of Categorical Judgment combined with a qualitative methodology, namely brainstorming. From sample comprising 342-degree students from the Health Sciences area, we were able to rank16 desirable qualities in a University lecturer by order of importance. The Kruskal-Wallis test did not lead to any statistically significant differences between the orders, and we did obtain high correlations between them. In this way, we can submit a single list in which closeness to the student is highly prominent in the valuations. This result is a wake-up call to the traditional educational evaluations conducted through surveys, in which certain aspects of emotional competencies are frequently ignored, which, moreover, should be part of programs of pedagogical university training in order to enhance and improve teaching quality. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.