Comprehensive Evaluation for Teaching Quality of College Faculty

— The fair, objective, scientific, and comprehensive evaluation of teaching quality helps college teachers improve the quality of teaching, and en-ables colleges to realize their goals of talent training. Therefore, it is important to find a way to comprehensively evaluate the teaching quality of college teachers. Drawing on the theories of analytic hierarchy process (AHP), this paper sets up an evaluation index system (EIS) for teaching quality of college teachers, and determines the weight of each index. Taking the teachers of a college for example, the multi-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) was carried out to quantify the teaching quality of these teachers. The results show that AHP and FCE can quantify and qualify the teaching quality at the same time. The combined use of the two techniques is applicable to comprehensive evaluation of teaching quality, and the assessment of a single factor, offering a complete understanding of the teaching quality of college teachers. The research provides a scientific way to evaluate the teaching quality of college teachers, and a realistic tool to enhance the teaching quality in colleges.


Introduction
In China, although the popularization of higher education has satisfied people's strong desire and ardent demand for higher education, in recent years, as the scale of higher education expands gradually, the teaching quality of higher education has been questioned by the public, in view of this issue, Chinese government has now included the improvement of teaching quality of higher education in the top agenda, and this issue has become the core task of the development of higher education. Under normal conditions, teachers, student sources, and school resources are regarded as three main factors that can affect the quality of teaching; teachers are the executors of teaching tasks; therefore, they are the key influencing factor of teaching quality of higher education [1]. The evaluation of the classroom teaching quality of college faculty is an important link in the teaching quality management of colleges and universities, it has very important significance for improving the teaching quality of the faculty and 156 http://www.i-jet.org efficiency of the school, as a result, quite a few scholars have conducted research on the comprehensive evaluation of the teaching quality of college faculty. Teaching assessment has become a separate discipline since the end of the 19th century, and it develops and improves continuously along with the development of education [2]. The United States and the United Kingdom have respectively formulated standards for teacher assessment. The NBPTS standards formulated by the United States consist of five parts, and the British teacher assessment standards consist of two parts: teaching practice and teaching effect [3]. In China, although the research on the teaching quality evaluation of college teachers is quite common already and teaching assessment has been carried out in most schools, these assessment methods are traditional means such as distributing scoring tables and asking students and experts to score, and then taking the average scores as the final assessment results [4]. However, existing teaching quality EISs are flawed, assessment methods are rigescent, the quantitative analysis of the weights of evaluation indexes lacks evidence, the weight values are usually determined by a few experts based on their personal experience, the so-called "quantified" evaluation results make the objectivity and completeness of the evaluation questionable, and it's difficult to give fair assessment to the teaching quality of teachers, which can harm the improvement of teachers' teaching ability [5]. AHP and FCE are two techniques commonly used in teaching quality evaluation at home and abroad, both have their respective pros and cons [6].
In order to get more objective and accurate faculty teaching quality evaluation results, this study proposes to combine AHP with FCE to build EIS, determine index weights, and give comprehensive assessments to the teaching quality of college faculty.

About AHP
AHP is a systematic analysis method that integrates quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, it is applicable to determining the weight coefficients of indexes in complex problems, the method has many merits, it's systematic, simple, easy to understand, flexible, and practical [7]. The basic process is shown in Figure 1 [8]. Many indexes are involved in the teaching quality evaluation of college faculty, however, some of them are fuzzy and have no clear boundaries or specific extensions, and they cannot be expressed as a definite number [9]. The FCE is an accurate evaluation method for fuzzy things developed based on the basic principles of fuzzy mathematics [10]. From bottom level to top level, the multi-level FCE gives comprehensive evaluations on each category of indexes level by level, and finally gets the comprehensive evaluation results [11]. This method can avoid the inaccuracy problem of fuzzy calculation when there are too many evaluation indexes. Figure 2 gives the steps of multi-level FCE [12].   Construction of EIS

Evaluation index analysis
In order to give scientific and objective evaluations, the first thing to do is to determine the evaluation indexes and their specific content, after reviewing relevant literatures, this study compared, analyzed, and summarized similar EISs in recent years, and decided to analyze the evaluation indexes and their content from four aspects, see Figure 3 [13].
1. Teaching content: Teaching content is the fundamental point for teaching quality evaluation, and the quality of teaching content directly affects the quality of teaching. Generally, the teaching content-related indexes should contain the following content: whether the teaching content is in line with the teaching goals of professional courses; whether the teaching content is clear, comprehensive, correct, and systematic; whether the teaching content can combine knowledge with specific ability [14].  Teaching method: Teaching methods are the specific means and ways applied by teachers during the teaching process to achieve the teaching goals and ensure the imparting of teaching content, with the gradual advancement of education and teaching reforms, the traditional teaching methods can no longer meet the needs of modern quality education. Teachers should adopt diverse teaching methods and tools based on actual situations of teaching goals, teaching content, and students, and try their best to trigger students' learning enthusiasm and cultivate their various abilities and qualities. When evaluating the teaching methods, there is a saying: there're fixed rules in teaching, but the teaching methods shouldn't be fixed, therefore, the evaluation indexes related to teaching method should contain the following content: whether the teaching method is diverse and flexible; and whether the teaching method can meet the actual requirements of students and teaching [15]. 3. Teaching ability: Teachers' teaching ability mainly includes: general ability, lecturing ability, academic research ability, and teaching research ability. Solely from the perspective of classroom teaching quality, teachers' teaching ability should include: the ability to master professional knowledge, the ability to practice, the basic professional skills (such as language expression ability and textbook explanation ability), the ability to understand and inspire students, the ability to organize and manage the classrooms, and the ability to apply teaching methods, etc.
[16]. 4. Teaching effect: Teaching effect is the result of teaching. Generally, it should include the following content: the completion of teaching goals; students' ability, attitude, and emotional goals realization; the classroom teaching atmosphere; and student participation.

Determination of the subjects of teaching quality evaluation
In order to build a college faculty teaching quality evaluation system with full participation and benign interaction and improve the reliability and validity of teaching quality evaluation, it's necessary to build the evaluation system with multiple evaluation subjects.
1. Student evaluation is primary: Students are main participants, objects, and knowledge receivers in the teaching activities, so they have the most say in teaching quality evaluation. College students have mature minds, independent thinking, and correct judgement, therefore, they can give objective and accurate evaluations on the teaching quality of teachers. Students' evaluation is helpful for teachers to discover problems existing the teaching process in a timely manner, thus optimizing the teaching activities and improving the teaching quality. In the evaluation of college faculty teaching quality, it's very necessary to determine the primary status of students [17]. 2. Expert evaluation is guarantee: Most colleges and universities have introduced peer evaluation and expert evaluation in teaching quality evaluation, however, due to the influence of human relationships, peer evaluation results are easily distorted. In terms of expert evaluation, professional experts who are experienced in teaching and familiar with classroom teaching activities are invited by colleges and universities to form supervisor teams and they are asked to attend 1-2 lectures randomly each semester, however, since there're many accidental factors in this lecture supervision mode, still the evaluation results might be one-sided. In order to avoid these unwanted situations and ensure that the evaluation results are objective, fair, accurate and effective, this study randomly selected a peer and a supervisor to form an expert evaluation team, the two team members were asked to score the teaching quality of a same teacher at different times, if the difference between the two scores is too large, then the evaluation is considered invalid; if the difference is not large, then the average score is taken as the final expert evaluation result [18]. 3. Teacher self-evaluation is foundation: Teachers are the designers, organizers, and implementers of teaching activities. Only the teachers themselves know the extent of their efforts, the progress made by students, and the degree of realization of the teaching goals best. Self-evaluation is helpful for teachers to timely reflect on the teaching activities, discover problems in teaching works, adjust the teaching works, and improve their professional level constantly, therefore, teacher self-evaluation is a fundamental impetus for improving teaching quality [19].

EIS for college faculty teaching quality
Based on the analysis in above paragraphs concerning the evaluation indexes, content, and evaluation subjects, this paper constructed an EIS for college faculty teaching quality, as shown in Figure 4.

Index weight determination
The weight values of indexes in each level were determined by AHP. To ensure reasonable weight value distribution of evaluation indexes, 10 experienced experts from several colleges were invited to construct judgement matrixes using 1-9 scales, numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 represent that in the matrix Ai is equally important to, slightly more important than, more important than, much more important than, and extremely more important than Aj; and numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8 represent and the degree of importance is between two adjacent degrees, for example, 2 represents the degree of importance is between equally important and slightly more important [20].
where, RI is random index, by looking up tables it's known that when n=3,  13 131 132 14 141 142 ( , ) U U U = 2. Establish comment set: Since teachers with different education degrees, work experience, and professional titles have different teaching levels, this paper referred to expert opinions and divided the evaluation results of college faculty teaching quality into four levels: excellent, good, average, and need to be improved, and then a comment set was established accordingly: , , , excellent,good, medium, It needs to be strengthened 3. Establish weight sets According to above calculation results, weight sets of student evaluation indexes were established: 300 students from a university were invited to evaluate the teaching quality of a teacher X, after the results were sorted out and analyzed, judgement matrixes of 164 http://www.i-jet.org membership degree of teaching content, teaching method, teaching attitude and teaching effect were constructed, here the judgement matrix of membership degree of teaching content is taken as an example for calculation and analysis. The evaluation matrix of membership degree of teaching content is: The final evaluation score of the teaching quality of teacher X is: iJET -Vol. 16, No. 18, 2021