This doctoral dissertation examines the measurement aspects of higher education teacher excellence. The study addresses how higher education teacher excellence can be conceptually defined, operationalised for measurement, and examined in terms of the psychometric characteristics of the developed instrument. In the theoretical part, higher education teacher excellence is situated within the broader context of the quality of teaching in higher education. The dissertation shows that different conceptions of quality imply different criteria for its evaluation. It also reviews existing approaches to defining higher education teacher excellence and presents a validity framework in which the study of excellence must provide evidence that supports the interpretation of results in relation to their intended use. The study was guided by the assumption that higher education teacher excellence can be conceptualised through disciplinary, didactic, and pedagogical excellence. The empirical part examines whether this conceptualisation is also supported as an empirically distinguishable measurement structure.
The empirical part of the dissertation consists of four related studies. In the first study, a qualitative approach was used to define and operationalise the characteristics of higher education teacher excellence and to develop an initial pool of questionnaire items. In the second study, higher education teachers assessed the importance of individual characteristics of excellence, while in the third study the same characteristics were assessed by students. In both studies, the internal structure of the questionnaire, the reliability of the scales, and the distinctiveness of the assumed dimensions were examined. In the fourth study, the questionnaire was adapted so that students assessed a specific higher education teacher in the context of a particular course, and the relationship between perceived teacher excellence and perceived learning outcomes was examined.
The findings show that both higher education teachers and students assessed most of the examined characteristics as relevant for evaluating higher education teacher excellence. The characteristics rated as most important were those most closely tied to how the teaching process is carried out: clarity of explanation, preparedness for teaching, fairness, respectful treatment, and support for students’ learning and development. Confirmatory factor analyses did not support the theoretically assumed three-dimensional conceptualisation of excellence. Exploratory graph analysis indicated a multidimensional organisation of items, but the domains were substantively intertwined and not clearly delimited.
The key finding of the dissertation is that higher education teacher excellence should not be understood as a reflective construct in which individual characteristics are merely reflections of a single common latent trait. It is more appropriately understood as a configuration of interrelated competencies, practices, and teacher characteristics. The dissertation contributes to the understanding of conceptions of higher education teacher excellence in the Slovenian higher education context, to the development of a questionnaire for studying this area, and to reflection on the possibilities and limitations of measuring and evaluating higher education teacher excellence.
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