ESTABLISHING THE VALIDITY OF SHORT-FORM COMPOSITE ITEMS IN THE CONTEXT OF TEACHING EVALUATIONS

Abstract

The current study seeks to demonstrate the validity of a short form teaching evaluation instrument that has been created to measure several dimensions of teaching effectiveness. The primary motivation for this study stems from some of the shortcomings that exist with the current teaching evaluation tool that is used in the majority of classrooms at the University of Kansas, including its length. The items of the new short form are composite in nature such that each item consists of two or three key adjectives describing a particular construct of interest. The main empirical question is how much information would be lost by using this short form compared to a long form with multiple items per construct. For each student, data were collected on both a long and a short form. A total of 1297 students from 51 classrooms participated. Results indicated that the short form was a valid measure, despite smaller magnitude correlations and factor loadings compared to the long form measure of the same constructs.