An Analysis of the Relationship between Effective Teaching and Effective Learning at UTP

Literature abounds with research on effective teaching and student assessments. Findings are often similar and almost as many are contradictory. One way of defining effective teaching is using Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) which surveys students’ satisfaction on the lecturer's performance. In this paper, we analyse data from the Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP), taken from 53 courses ranging from foundation up to final year courses and covering humanities to core engineering courses. We investigate the relationship between the lecturers’ ratings which is assumed to represent teaching effectiveness and the average class grade of the courses which is assumed to represent learning effectiveness. Our analysis finds a correlation of 39% overall, with minor variations for the variables studied. An obvious conclusion is that SET alone is not adequate for assessing teaching effectiveness and other aspects of teaching and learning are needed.