Research has been valued and given priority over teaching for a long time in academia.  In recent decades, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education has pursued objective and quantitative research criteria and has encouraged higher education institutions to ask teachers to publish papers in SSCI or SCI journals as part of the criteria for promotion and evaluation.  This policy strengthens the concept that research has priority over teaching because teachers must devote more time to research than to teaching in order to be promoted and evaluated.The purpose of this study is to explore the influences that cause teachers to value research over teaching.  To achieve this purpose, document analysis, the analysis of Taiwan Higher Education database and interviews were adapted as methods. First of all, our researchers collected and analyzed the documents for promotion and evaluation of twelve different universities whose areas of specialty included general studies, education, medicine, vocational studies, and the arts. Then, the study used and analyzed the empirical data of teachers’ working hours every week for different tasks from the Taiwan Higher Education Database which investigated the working conditions of teachers in higher education in 2004. Additionally, twenty professors who have different areas of study and work in different types of universities were interviewed to collect teachers’ opinions of the task priority of research, teaching, and service duties. The results showed that academia in Taiwan exhibits the phenomenon that research is valued over teaching. The reasons are due to the requirements of the reward system. The reward system emphasizes research over teaching and service. Teachers’ research achievements are judged based on publishing articles in different types of journals and the amount of research funding they can obtain. The results also showed that every week teachers spend the most time on teaching, then on research, and finally on service. However, teachers emphasize research as the most important task, then teaching, and finally service. Although the majority of teachers think research is the most important duty, there is still twenty percent of teachers who think it is the least important. Although teaching has been thought of as the second most important duty after research, it is the task that the most teachers give as the first priority as far as time spent and none of the interviewees thought it is the least important. Universities and teachers all try to use their professionalism as capital to gain financial support from the government. This situation forces teachers to try to put more time and energy into research, but they still need to maintain teaching and service work quality. Some teachers focus more time and energy on research and ignore the needs of students. Working time endlessly increases even for teachers who out value on both teaching and research. Some suggestions based on the findings have been proposed for Taiwanese higher institutions.

The purpose of the study is to explore the influence of teaching evaluations on teachers in that they might try to please their students by giving higher grades in order to get higher teaching evaluation scores. To achieve this purpose, the study analyzed the correlations between teaching evaluation scores, student's final grades and course fail rates, and it also examined whether students' final scores and course fail rates are important predictors of teaching evaluation scores. The study used teaching evaluation scores and students' final grades of the courses offered in the fall term of academic year 2014 and the spring term of academic year 2015 in one university in Taiwan as research samples. The results showed that both student's final grades and course fail rates are predictors of teaching evaluation scores. There is a positive correlation between teaching evaluation scores and students' final grades, and a negative correlation between teaching evaluation scores and course fail rates. Based on the findings, the study inferred that the implementation of teaching evaluations may influence teachers to give better grades and lower course requirements to please their students in order to get higher teaching evaluation scores.

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