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ABSTRACT
Major reform in nursing education is underway, with increased emphasis being placed on the importance of the teacher-student relationship. An instrument for evaluation of teaching effectiveness, developed at the Oregon Health Sciences University School of Nursing, attempts to capture the student's perception of the quality of the teacher-student relationship as well as other salient aspects of teaching practices. The evaluation tool contains 26 items evaluating teaching effectiveness and 14 items that evaluate the course. The teaching effectiveness items yield five scales including: knowledge and expertise, facultative teaching methods, communication style, use of own experiences, and feedback. Psychometric testing has been completed and there is evidence of construct validity in relation to teaching effectiveness and internal consistency reliability for the five scales.
For over two decades, the behavioral model of education has dominated curriculum development, the design of instructional strategies, and the evaluation of both teachers and students (Bevis & Watson, 1989). This model assumes that important things to be learned can be specified in terms of behavioral outcomes; similarly, important aspects of teaching can be described in terms of specific, observable teacher behaviors. Consequently, evaluation of teaching effectiveness has been based on the behavioral model - both in terms of identifying what good teachers do (e.g., state objectives clearly in advance) and by the idea that good teaching can be specified in terms of these behaviors.
There is now a national movement in the United States for major reform in nursing education; and numerous alternatives to the behavioral model have been introduced, including feminist pedagogy (Wheeler & Chinn, 1989), critical social theory (Allen, 1990), phenomenological approaches (Diekelmann, 1988), and humanisticeducative models (Bevis & Watson, 1989). Although these models differ in many regards, they all share an emphasis on the importance of the teacher-student relationship.
In the humanistic-educative model offered by Bevis (1988), curriculum is defined as interactions that occur between teachers and students and among students. It is through these transactions that learning takes place and the teacher-student relationship is the curriculum. Diekelmann's (1988) phenomenological model stresses the need to transform the relationship between teacher and student in order to open up the possibility for learning from one another through meaningful dialogue. In feminist pedagogy (Wheeler & Chinn, 1989), the traditional power relationship...