Motivation of engineering students to participate in teaching evaluations

This study employs expectancy theory to evaluate sonic key factors that motivate students to participate in the teaching evaluation process. The results show that engineering students generally consider the improvement of teaching; to be the most important outcome of teaching evaluations, followed by the improvement of course content and format. Making the results of evaluations available for students' decisions on course and instructor selection ranked third, while the least important use was influencing a professor's tenure, promotion, and salary raise. Students' motivation to participate in teaching evaluations is also impacted significantly by their expectation that they will be able to provide meaningful feedback.