Red U (Sep 2015)
Competencies of good university teachers. Students’s opinion
Abstract
This paper presents the students’ point of view about the competencies of a good university teacher, obtained from a questionnaire based on the teaching competencies stated and validated according to the REDU2012 Project. 10302 undergraduate students and 1700 master students from 15 universities answered through an online formulary suitable also for mobile devices. The importance that has been given to the 16 characteristics defined in the questionnaire is remarkably high: all of them are qualified either as good or as excellent. That the teacher explains clearly the subject’s content is the best-scored characteristic, followed by the motivation encouragement. Both characteristics are highly rated by students, with no regard of their original areas of knowledge, their year or their sex. The lowest rated skills in order to be a good teacher are the encouragement of participation and of collaborative work and the coordination with teachers of other subjects, although their scores exceed also 7.5 (in a scale from 0 to 10). When relating the research results with the teaching competencies we observe that the highest assessment goes to communicative competencies, interpersonal relationship competencies and methodological competencies. Instead, competencies of planning and management of the teaching and teamwork competencies are less rated.
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