Abstract:
The increasing accountability of vocational education teachers to their learners and
the wider community has been a feature of the post-compulsory, further educational
environment for the past decade. This accountability has come about because students
now have much greater expectations of their teachers than in previous times. This
situation is the outcome of factors such as the creation of a vocational education
marketplace, internal and external competition for students and students awareness of
their rights as learners. In turn this has lead to evaluation of vocational education
teachers becoming more or less standard practice across Australia.
Most vocational education institutions utilise some type of evaluation methodology to
provide both the individual teachers and administrators with feedback from the
students. For example, reaction-evaluation questionnaires that are often administered
anonymously by staff. The resultant comments are then provided to the teacher and
other interested parties to act upon as they see fit.
This paper looks at some of the problems and issues associated with using a range of
the most commonly used teacher evaluation tools. An examination of issues and
problems in this area leads to the conclusion that the evaluation of vocational
teaching and learning is limited by the quality and usefulness of the data that can be
provided. It is concluded that further education teachers should seek to supplement
data on their effectiveness from a range of different sources over time and that more
evidence should be provided about actual student learning and outcomes in the
evaluation process.
