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The Chinese Ministry of Education recently called for improvements in undergraduate teaching. One way to meet this mandate is to codify what Chinese undergraduate students consider to be poor teaching behaviors. Across three phases, this study investigated poor teacher behaviors and compared them to existing data from American students. The categories of poor teaching generated by both sets of students overlapped considerably. However, some characteristics of poor teaching--such as teachers being unfair to students--may be unique to China. The specific behaviors that are representative of poor teaching qualities differed across the two cultures, suggesting the need for a nuanced approach to examining what students perceive to be poor teaching.

Researchers have found that students from different academic disciplines tend to value different qualities in their teachers, and cultural differences play a role in which qualities students appreciate in their professors. The present/current study employed the Teacher Behavior Checklist as an operationalization of teaching qualities in a comparative investigation among psychology, chemical engineering, and education students in China. Chinese college students' perceptions of excellent teachers' qualities differed across the three disciplines. We offer some contextual and cultural explanations for the differences and conclude that student evaluations of instruction should always be interpreted within the context of the evaluation.

We "employed the Teacher Behavior Checklist" (TBC) to investigate Chinese college students' perceptions of excellent teachers' qualities and then compared the results to those from previously collected data from American and Japanese students. Chinese students tended to favor additional structure both in the classroom and in teachers' roles than either Japanese or American students. Teachers wishing to use the TBC to improve teaching quality should carefully consider subtle cultural differences that influence students' perceptions of their teachers.

The Chinese Ministry of Education recently called for improvements in undergraduate teaching. One way to meet this mandate is to codify what Chinese undergraduate students consider to be poor teaching behaviors. Across three phases, this study investigated poor teacher behaviors and compared them to existing data from American students. The categories of poor teaching generated by both sets of students overlapped considerably. However, some characteristics of poor teaching—such as teachers being unfair to students—may be unique to China. The specific behaviors that are representative of poor teaching qualities differed across the two cultures, suggesting the need for a nuanced approach to examining what students perceive to be poor teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have found that students from different academic disciplines tend to value different qualities in their teachers, and cultural differences play a role in which qualities students appreciate in their professors. The present/current study employed the Teacher Behavior Checklist as an operationalization of teaching qualities in a comparative investigation among psychology, chemical engineering, and education students in China. Chinese college students’ perceptions of excellent teachers’ qualities differed across the three disciplines. We offer some contextual and cultural explanations for the differences and conclude that student evaluations of instruction should always be interpreted within the context of the evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employed the Teacher Behavior Checklist (TBC) to investigate Chinese college students’ perceptions of excellent teachers’ qualities and then compared the results to those from previously collected data from American and Japanese students. Chinese students tended to favor additional structure both in the classroom and in teachers’ roles than either Japanese or American students. Teachers wishing to use the TBC to improve teaching quality should carefully consider subtle cultural differences that influence students’ perceptions of their teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]