An evaluation of Sultan Qaboos University Course and Teaching Survey form: Perceptions of administrators, faculty, and students

The purpose of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of the Sultan Qaboos University Course and Teaching Survey form (SQU CTS). The study investigates three major issues: the comparison between the reliability and validity of the old and the new SQU CTS forms, instructors' self-evaluation as a criteria of the validity of student evaluations of teaching effectiveness, and the views of administrators, faculty members, and students regarding student evaluations of teaching effectiveness in general and the SQU CTS form in particular.; Data sources of this study were from the colleges of education and science at Sultan Qaboos University and consisted of: archive data of student evaluations, data collected from faculty self-evaluations of their teaching using the CTS, and interviews conducted with faculty administrators, faculty members, and students.; The results show that the CTS is a unidimensional form, suggesting that the students in the colleges of education and science at SQU have a general perception of effective teaching. Cronbach's alpha reported high internal reliability for both the new and old CTS forms. Corrected item-total correlation illustrated the weak items in the survey. The 17 CTS items produced a generalizability coefficient of .71 for both relative and absolute decisions. Furthermore, the CTS form included most of the categories that are covered by the SEEQ, IDEA, and SIR surveys. However, these three surveys consisted of many items within each category, while the CTS has fewer items. Moreover, the findings indicate that in the college of education there were high magnitude differences among the student evaluations, instructor self-evaluations, and whether an instructor enjoys teaching and views teaching as important. Non-significant results, however, were obtained from the college of science. SQU's faculty administrators, faculty, and students appeared to have the same perspectives regarding student evaluations in general and the CTS form in particular. Finally, the results show that there is a 22% magnitude difference between the student evaluations in the colleges of education and science.