The evaluation of the Higher Education lecturer competences in East Timor: a student inquiry

Abstract

Several studies have demonstrated the impact of quality teacher performance on teaching and students' learning (Minelli, Rebora and Turri, 2015, Brewer, Knoeppel andLindle, 2015). In addition to accountability (Blackmore, 2009), the evaluation of teachers' performance allows to evaluate the quality of teaching. Students are often asked to evaluate the performance of their teachers (Carrell and West, 2010, Braga, Paccagnella and Pellizzari, 2014, Nikolaidis and Dimitriadis, 2014 since their feedback is a way of assessing the results of teaching and to point out the aspects to be improved. It was for this purpose that the Government of East Timor defined in 2013 measures to improve the quality of public education, through the National Strategic Plan for Education 2011-2030 (METL, 2011. In this study we intend to evaluate the impact of these recent measures on the timorese public higher education teachers' performance. We question how the students evaluate the performance of the competences of the teachers of the National University of East Timor (UNTL)? Using a random sample of 342 students enrolled in four of the nine faculties of UNTL, surveys were carried out to evaluate the pedagogical, professional, social and personal competencies. The results showed a very positive performance of all teachers' competences, in particular the pedagogical and professional competences. It was pointed out the need to enhance the use of the information and communication technologies and to introduce more diversified pedagogical resources in the classroom, for a more effective and meaningful learning of students.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which allows use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.