Students and teachers may bring additional purposes to the classroom, but for purposes of evaluation, the main concern is the amount of significant learning generated. The teacher is an important but indirect factor in the process of learning . In higher education, the teacher has primary responsibility for key decisions about a course. These decisions include such things as determining the scope of a course, identifying the educational goals, selecting reading materials, constructing tests, and assigning grades. This refers to such characteristics of teachers as develop with students, and the degree to which they are organized and prepared for class on a regular basis.
Students can inspire or discourage the teacher and vice versa.
In summary, teaching can be viewed as an interactive process that takes place within several types of contexts for the purpose of generating as much significant learning as possible. The type of evaluation appropriate for use in higher education is four dimensional. It calls for an examination of the input, the process, the product, and the context of an event or action. When this general framework is applied to the specific situation of college courses it results in the five items identified in Figure 2. The first dimension of teaching evaluation is the teacher's input, his or her knowledge of the subject matter .