Abstract:

Numerous studies on the effectiveness of students’ evaluations of teaching quality have shown that it is not enough to provide the instructors with the evaluation results in order to improve teaching quality (for an overview, see Penny & Coe, 2004; Rindermann, 2009). In fact, instructors need external educational consultation for noticeable and stable improvements of their teaching (Dresel & Rindermann, 2011; Rindermann, Kohler, & Meisenberg, 2007). The Project “SoKonBe” is introduced which aims at improving teaching quality of university instructors by means of an external educational consultation that focuses on the effective use of socio-cognitive conflicts. In this contribution, we present a questionnaire (7 items) for assessing instructors’ socio-cognitive conflicts after students’ evaluations of instruction. The results of the pilot study of this questionnaire are reported. A confirmatory factor analysis (N = 39 participations) yielded the two factors “epistemic conflict elaboration” (3 items) and “socio-emotional conflict elaboration” (3 items), plus one extra item. This project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Keywords:

Socio-cognitive conflicts, university instructors, students’ evaluations, teaching quality.