College teaching is a very complex activity that cannot easily be defined or measured. Part of the reason is that teaching at any level cannot be divorced from the context in which it takes place and particularly from the teachers and learners who are involved. Good teaching in a graduate seminar in physics is not necessarily the same as good teaching in a large, introductory physics course, and it is certainly different from teaching in music or philosophy, or languages or medicine or business, whether in college or elsewhere. Another issue is that there is no single definition of good teaching. A major criterion of good teaching is, of course, the learning that results, but teachers cannot be held entirely responsible for student learning, and often, learning is as difficult to define and measure as teaching. Research on college teaching and learning has identified several factors that contribute to successful outcomes, but the presence or absence of these factors (often called dimensions, behaviors, practices, conditions, or principles) does not automatically mean that teaching is good or bad.
What is clear is that even though there are established general relationships between teaching and learning, each teaching and learning situation possesses unique characteristics and success is largely dependent on being able to capitalize on the conditions that promote learning and to avoid those factors that may impede it. The direct responsibility for success is shared by teachers and students, but this does not exempt institutions and academic units from some degree of responsibility for providing the tools, resources, and environments that allow teachers and students to maximize the benefits that result from their efforts. Indeed, the research shows how critical it is to create environments that promote and support success whether these are in traditional classrooms where teachers and students regularly meet face-to-face, or in new, virtual classrooms where teachers and students interact via the Internet and may never have such meetings.
A Short History
Since the 1950s there has been a tremendous amount of research on college teaching, and this work has become more comprehensive and productive, particularly since the early 1970s. Part of the impetus for this work came from faculty who were interested in understanding and improving teaching and learning in their classrooms. These faculty, however, were from all disciplines, and they did not have an organized body of research and theory upon which to base their investigations, experience in educational research, or criteria to guide their investigative methods and practices. Those with more specific training and experiences, for example psychologists and educational researchers, had a dual interest because research on teaching and learning not only served their own teaching but also contributed to the literature in their own disciplines. After World War II, the rapid growth of federal, state, and private funding in support of teaching and learning allowed these researchers to carry out large and comprehensive studies that formed the basis of research for the next half-century.
From another quarter, the social activism and student unrest during the 1960s fueled demands that a college education should be more relevant to students’ interests and needs and more connected to real-world issues both in the personal realm of career preparation and the broad sociopolitical arena.
A third force was the growing interest in determining the extent to which higher education was fulfilling its roles. Institutional boards of trustees, state and federal governments, accrediting agencies, and others became more actively interested in the outcomes of a college education, and the matter of accountability became a more and more pressing issue as time went on. It was necessary to have ways of determining both what was happening (the instruments or processes of education) as well as what resulted (the consequences or outcomes of education). In the mid-to-late 1960s, landmark work began in the field of evaluation. Michael Scriven (1967) coined the terms formative and summative evaluation, with the former meaning evaluation for purposes of revision and improvement and the latter meaning evaluation for purposes of making decisions about the merit or worth of individuals, programs, units, or institutions. The evaluation of faculty performance and specifically of college teaching grew exponentially with early, major books on the topic contributed by Kenneth O. Doyle (1975) and John A. Centra (1979). The primary source of information for evaluating teaching was student-provided data from teacher/course evaluation questionnaires commonly referred to as student ratings ofteaching. In a series of reports, Peter Seldin documented the growth of the use of student ratings, and by the mid-1990s well over 90 percent of higher education institutions in the United States were using student ratings as part of the evaluation of college teaching.
By the mid-1980s, it became apparent that typical classroom testing was not providing sufficiently detailed information about the nature and outcomes of teaching. More specific investigation was required to truly measure learning, and the assessment movement gained momentum. In their 1993 study, Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross provided widely used guidelines for practice, and the quality of institutional assessment has become a primary criterion used by accreditation agencies not only to determine the extent to which student learning outcomes have been achieved but also as a mechanism to help teachers and programs develop better, more measurable objectives. Without clear specification of the intended outcomes, measurement becomes difficult. As the common paraphrase notes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know if you get there.”

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