Abstract:

The question of what constitutes an excellent university professor has been widely popular in both psychology and education. Also, it is not possible to construct valid and reliable instrument for student evaluations of teaching without taking into consideration what the phrase "good professor" actually defaults.

Ory and Ryan (2001) have noted how valid conclusions about student evaluations can not be made if the professors are not familiar with the whole instrument. In order for student evaluation to be reliable measure of professor's efficiency, the very definition of what makes a professor effective and efficient must be clear. Ory and Ryan (2001) concluded that there is no universal set of characteristics of effective teachers that could be used as a starting point . Also, priorities in education vary from institution to institution, but also from case to case. Evaluations can never be separated from the different styles of teaching and goals of professors. To develop an instrument that would be valid and reliable is particularly difficult because uniform and stable measures of effective professors vary across the cultures.

The purpose of this article is to provide the literature overview of recent researches that deal with the cultural differences in students' perceptions of excellent teachers qualities and to analyze how these characteristics can be taken into consideration while constructing instrument of student evaluations of teaching. Also, the Teacher Behavior Checklist (TBC; Buskist et al., 2002) will be analyzed in terms of its international generalizability. The list of top ten excellent teaching qualities will be made based on the literature review of the results of previously conducted surveys in this area. Also, the implications for both teaching and learning will be discussed as well as methods for the implementation of given qualities into the student evaluations of teaching.

Keywords:

Excellent professor, qualities of teaching, student evaluations of teaching, cross-cultural differences, Teacher Behavior Check List.