The Impact of Student Evaluation of Teaching Staff on Enhancing the Quality of Teaching in Higher Education in Romania

This paper presents the methodological approach adopted by a team of researchers from the Politehnica Bucharest National University of Science and Technology (UNSTPB) to revise and reconstruct the Feedback Form used in the university’s teaching staff evaluation process. (1) Background: Because of the imperative need to involve students, as active actors in the academic community, in this process, a Questionnaire on the identification of the students’ perception regarding the Feedback Form used by the institution was prepared and distributed online to 559 students enrolled in bachelor’s/master’s/doctoral programs in our higher education institution; (2) Methods: Taking into account the legal provisions in force, the scientific guidelines in the literature, and the recommendations/suggestions and observations made by our students, two instruments were developed for the evaluation of the teaching staff, i.e., the Feedback Questionnaire for students enrolled in bachelor’s/master’s degree programs and the Feedback Questionnaire for students enrolled in doctoral programs. By creating this tool to assess the university’s social reality, we aimed to identify the strengths/weaknesses of the Feedback Form used until this study was conducted; (3) Results: Centralizing and interpreting the data collected allowed us to gather complex and detailed insights on the way in which the beneficiaries of the educational services provided by the university want the feedback they provide to be formulated, collected, and interpreted, as well as a set of explicit student recommendations in this regard; (4) Conclusions: the need to start an ample revision process on the feedback questionnaire used to conduct the university’s teaching staff performance evaluation, based on the students’ unequivocal involvement, was justified by these fundamental premises.