The use of student ratings to measure instructors' teaching performance and effectiveness in tertiary education has been an important but controversial tool in the improvement of teaching quality during the past few decades. This is an attempt to explore non-instructional factors of student evaluations by discussing and reviewing relevant literature with regard to the most common non-instructional factors in student ratings. Moreover, semi-structured interviews were used with 14 college instructors. The findings show that most of the teachers support the use of student evaluations as a means of quality control and teaching improvement. However, the great majority of teachers expressed their concerns about the non-instructional factors which affect student ratings and make them meaningless. They reported that gender, time of evaluation, expected grades, nationality of the instructor, and other factors can affect student ratings. The study proposes some recommendations which might make student evaluation practices more useful and informative.Keywords: non-instructional factors, student evaluations, grading leniency, teaching effectiveness, grade inflation Background of the Study RationaleThe use of student ratings to measure instructors' teaching performance and effectiveness has been an important but controversial tool in the improvement of teaching quality during the past few decades (Spooren et al., 2007). However, most tertiary institutions rely on student ratings as an indicator of faculty teaching performance (Benton, 2011, p. 41). Empirical research has shown that there is a significant correlation between student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and student grades (Isely & Singh, 2005, p. 29). Student evaluations have a negative and a pernicious effect on teaching if they are not adjusted appropriately and accurately to measure teaching effectiveness (Arreola, 2007;Schneider, 2013). If student evaluations can be increased by giving higher grades, then they are a flawed instrument for evaluating teaching. Moreover, this process may contribute to the inflation of grades in higher education institutions if faculty members have an incentive to improve their evaluations and attract students (Krautmann & Sander, 1999). The findings of Krautmann and Sander (1999) indicated that grades affect student evaluations, and faculty have the ability to "buy" higher evaluations by lowering their grading standards (p. 61). Schneider (2013) claims that faculty at higher education institutions that place significant weight on student evaluations often report that they give out easy grades, avoid controversial material, and dumb down courses in order to get higher student evaluations (p. 122). He criticises student evaluations as a practice poisonous to the teaching environment, inaccurate, easily manipulated, and lacking psychometric sense, reliability, and validity. Furthermore, D'Apollonia and Abrami (1997, cited in Germain & Scanduran, n.d) claim that student evaluations are unsophisticated and provide little insig...

The importance of collaborative writing (CW) is well attested in English Language Teaching (ELT). This study attempts to explore English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' and students' views, perceptions and experiences with CW and to find ways to improve this type of writing practice. Quantitative and qualitative methodologies were employed to collect the data. To address the issues in the study, a questionnaire was distributed to 64 EFL students at a public college in Oman and five teachers were interviewed. The findings show that the vast majority of teachers and students had positive views about the current CW practices, which concurs with the findings of previous research. Further, the study indicated that both students and teachers can play a significant role in improving CW practice by following certain strategies, such as those involving clarifying CW task learning outcomes, fair assessment, monitoring, solving CW group conflicts, CW group management and clear division of CW group work. Based on the teachers' and students' views, and the findings from the literature, some suggestions for improving CW are proposed which may help to enhance CW practice.

(1) Background: this paper aimed at modeling the sustainable integration of quality and energy management system (IQEM) via identifying critical success factors (CSFs) and analyzing the effect on energy management; (2) Methods: The research adopted theoretical and practical methods, through carefully examining the literature to extract the research gap and CSFs that establish a sustainable model for the integration of quality and energy management, while the practical method was energy experts’ arbitration and to develop a sustainable model in power plants. The study used SmartPLS and SPSS software for analysis purposes, collected data using a 5-point Likert scale and employed a cross-sectional approach survey questionnaire; (3) Results: The research succeeded in identifying the most important CSFs necessary for the sustainable integration of (IQEM). This investigation discovered that the identified CSFs are significantly related to the electricity sector’s energy management integration success (EMIS). The study’s results showed that the identified IQEM’s CSFs, such as EP with p-values (0.000), SQI (0.000), EMT (0.019), A (0.003), SP (0.010), are significantly associated with EMIS and improve quality and energy management; (4) Conclusions: This study succeeded in modeling a framework that ensures integrated and sustainable success between energy management and quality in developing countries power plants.

A quasi-experimental study was conducted to examin the effectiveness of providing written corrective feedback (WCF) to Arab speakers of English on ten uses of English prepositions. Arab speakers commonly find it difficult to correctly use English propositions, mainly due to the differences between the two languages (e.g. Ortega, 2009). Examples of prepositions misuse are "married from," "die from," and "kind with." The WCF implementation lasted for seven weeks. The students' being in intact classes made random assignments to different groups difficult. The data were derived from three tests: pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test as well as an open-ended questionnaire. The experimental group (n= 25) received WCF on their writing, oral meta-linguistic tutorials, and a treatment task for their pre-test. For both the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test, they only received WCF on their writings. The control group (n= 25) only received general comments, like "good organization of the story events." The statistical results of the independent samples t-test show the experimental group outperforming the control group on the target features. The analysis of the questionnaire data also shows the benefits of WCF for improving preposition use. The results also have pedagogical implications with regard to WCF.