The evaluation of the quality of teaching in the university: A review of the literature

This article provides a general overview of the literature about faculty evaluation. The review process begins from the main challenges that have been found in different publications, research reports and literature, where faculty evaluation has been addressed by its conceptions, purposes, approaches and instruments. Through this lens four aspects has been considered: the complexity of the teacher activity, the lack of agreement towards what to be a good teacher at university is, to limit the teacher’s responsibility only to student learning, and the growth of the criteria for teaching evaluation. These criteria could be materialized in some perspectives about “good teaching”. The review offers a clear idea of the state of the art regarding faculty evaluation research. It gives elements of analysis for the development of research in the future. The paper concludes by describing a comprehensive, open and flexible approach to teaching evaluation. In addition, we describe some foundations for the development of this approach.