Find out about what evaluation of teaching and courses has gone on recently in your department and then read through the pages, identifying where this evaluation is placed on each of the dimensions. Quantitative vs Qualitative Evaluation Quantitative evaluation attempts to measure or obtain a quantitative fix on what is going on. It counts instances, students, or frequencies of ratings and uses the numbers which emerge to provide a picture of what is happening. These numbers are often compared with numbers derived from evaluations of other courses, other teachers, or other occasions on which a course was taught in order to obtain a quantitative picture of whether a course is better or worse than some other course. For example in 53 interesting ways to appraise your teaching item 1 represents an attempt to summarise the performance of a lecturer in six scores for the purpose of comparing that lecturer with others.
Qualitative evaluation attempts to describe what is going on.
The descriptions can consist of observations, transcripts of interviews, photographs, videotapes or other kinds of information which convey the quality of what is being evaluated. For example in 53 interesting ways to appraise your teaching item 22 involves a method for portraying students' overall reactions to a course through very brief, randomly collected video interviews. Often quantitative evaluation is associated with the use of questionnaires, and qualitative evaluation with the use of interviews. However questionnaires can ask open-ended questions and collect qualitative data, and interviews can ask standard closed questions and count how often different responses are elicited. Goal Free Evaluation Related to the distinction between quantitative and qualitative evaluation is the distinction between evaluation which is intended to test specific hypotheses and evaluation which is open-minded, or 'goal free' about what is going on in a course.