Students’ evaluations of teaching (SETs) have been used as a primary means of evaluating the teaching quality at postsecondary institutions for a number of years. The research in this area has been consistently expanding in an effort to validate its use and efficacy. To date, there has been little consensus regarding the validity of these evaluations, especially with regards to the possible impact of extraneous factors. Researchers have previously found evidence of a link between the self-serving bias and grade expectations. The present study used an experimental design to examine the validity of SETs in the context of the self-serving bias. According to the self-serving bias, individuals will be more likely to attribute success internally but attribute failure externally. Specifically, the present study examined whether there were differences in the presence of the self-serving bias in relation to self-reported narcissism and shyness. Students at a large university aged 17 - 46 (N = 563) were asked to write a short essay on euthanasia and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the first condition, students were assigned a low grade; in the second condition, they were assigned a high grade. When they were given their essay grade back, students had an opportunity to rate their evaluator. Results indicated that students were more likely to externalize their essay grade when in the negative condition whereby they attributed their grade to reasons outside their control versus the positive condition, irrespective of their level of self-reported narcissism or shyness. These results suggest that the self-serving bias does exist within SETs and calls into question the validity of these evaluations. The findings from this study highlight the need for further research into the role that student characteristics play with regards to SETs.

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is becoming more prominent due to a number of forces, including an increase in ethical consumerism and government or industry regulation. Business owners are coming to the realisation that CSR investment should be viewed as an opportunity to increase the success of companies rather than as damage control or PR campaign; CSR is becoming a critical factor in the competitive success of companies. Increasing social responsibility can indeed result in benefits, financial and otherwise, not just for society but also for companies. This study aimed to determine:• Consumer preferences regarding the various CSR strategies that companies can pursue and• Whether consumers place higher value on CSR strategies which benefit their own society or strategies which benefit society at large.A convenience sample of South Africans were selected for the study and asked to complete a web-based survey. The study was done in the form of a conjoint value analysis.The study found that:• Consumers do have different levels of preference for the different CSR strategies which businesses can follow.• Consumers prefer a CSR strategy that benefits their own society over a CSR strategy that benefits the society at large. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This research focuses on the creation, validation, automation, and deployment of a nondestructive vertical electrical impedance (VEI) bridge deck assessment apparatus. A multichannel impedance analyzer with a moving platform is developed that can assess the deterioration state of a bridge deck without stationary traffic control. The multichannel apparatus is capable of taking over 500 impedance samples a second and can scan a bridge deck over 500 times faster than more traditional techniques. This research also shows VEI measurements are inversely proportional to the diffusivity of ions through concrete and that an impedance measurement frequency of 25 kHz is the most predictive measurement frequency of diffusivity. Finally, this research demonstrates the utility of VEI measurements by inspecting five asphalt overlaid bridges. VEI measurements were sensitive to defects in membranes and are one of the only nondestructive measurements that provide useful information about the deterioration state of asphalt overlaid bridge decks.

Student evaluations are the most common and often the only method used to evaluate teachers. In these evaluations, which typically occur at the end of every term, students rate their instructors on criteria accepted as constituting exceptional instruction in addition to an overall assessment. This presentation explores factors that influence student evaluations using the teacher ratings data of Brigham Young University from Fall 2001 to Fall 2006. This project uses ordinal regression to model the probability of an instructor receiving a good, average, or poor rating. Student grade, instructor status, class level, student gender, total enrollment, term, GE class status, and college are used as explanatory variables.

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Cognitive models of Social anxiety disorder (SAD) routinely discuss the cognitive biases (e.g., attentional, interpretation, memory) that contribute to thinking about oneself negatively before, during, and after social or performance situations. However, these models do not mention other impacts of negative self-evaluations - including negative evaluations of others - even though cognitive case formulations often include beliefs about oneself, others, the future, and the world. Importantly, CBT for SAD does not always lead to optimal subclinical symptoms at the end of treatment; suggesting that our most evidence-based treatments require modifications. Few studies have experimentally examined the presence of negative evaluations of others within social anxiety, which has led to inconsistent understanding about whether people with social anxiety demonstrate negative evaluations of others. These conflicting findings are even more complicated by no study examining if the negative self-evaluations that are commonly reported by people with SAD cause negative other-evaluations, and vice-versa. I outline two studies in this dissertation where I aimed to understand the relationship (or lack thereof) between negative self-evaluations and negative other-evaluations and its cognitive, behavioural, and emotional consequences. In Study 1, I randomly assigned an unselected sample (N = 152) to provide no-, medium-, or high-evaluations of a videotaped anxious person. Participants also took part in a 10- minute conversation task with a confederate posing as another participant. I measured social anxiety symptoms, state anxiety and electrodermal activity across four-time points, and several measures related to self- and other-evaluations. Overall, my manipulation was effective as participants responded to the subsequent other-evaluations in the way I anticipated. Despite this, I found no differences between conditions on most of my primary self-evaluation outcomes. However, I observed that participants in the high-evaluation condition demonstrated poorer memory recall. In Study 2, I randomly assigned an unselected sample (N = 169) to receive positive, ambiguous, or negative false-feedback following a conversation task with a confederate. My manipulation was effective, and again, I found no differences between conditions on my primary other-evaluation outcomes. Participants in the negative-feedback condition reported greater state anger following the negative evaluation for the remainder of the study, compared to participants in the other conditions. Ultimately, evaluations of others were less problematic than I initially expected. Because I did observe cognitive and emotional consequences of this self-other process, these findings could have important implications for further refinement of SAD models and treatments using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

This study extends job embeddedness and job satisfaction theory in several notable directions. As hypothesized, structural equation modeling revealed that community embeddedness was a partial mediator of the relationship between core self-evaluations and job satisfaction. Contrary to job embeddedness theory, this study found that organizational embeddedness and job satisfaction were best represented by a single latent factor. Thus, organizational embeddedness did not act as a mediator of the relationship between core self-evaluations and job satisfaction nor did it act as a multiple mediator with community embeddedness. Explanations of these results and new avenues for research are discussed. / Ph. D.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / Tweed R. Ross / The purpose of this research and development study was to design and develop an affordable, computer-based, pre-service teacher assessment and reporting system to allow teacher education institutions and supervising teachers to efficiently enter evaluation criteria, record pre-service teacher evaluations, and generate evaluation reports. The system design supports pre-service teacher evaluators and the data collection, evaluation, and reporting needs of pre-service teacher training institutions. The researcher used a literature review and a needs assessment to determine the need for the system and to define the system prototype’s functional requirements. The researcher used a modified ten-phase development approach (Borg & Gall, 1989) to develop the system. Three separate evaluator groups reviewed the system during development. Teacher licensing officers from private colleges and the Regents Universities in Kansas participated in the needs assessment phase of the study. Past and present National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) evaluation team members served as expert evaluators who provided feedback regarding the validity and functionality of the system prototype. Supervising professors from Regents University colleges of education and from private universities represented the target users and provided feedback regarding the validity, user friendliness, and usefulness of the system. Prior to sending the system prototype to evaluator groups, the prototype was reviewed by a select group of educators and information technology professionals to make sure the prototype was functioning properly and that it could be easily installed by evaluators. The overall results of the needs assessment indicated that the computer-based, pre-service teacher evaluation system that was developed would add value to and improve the evaluation process for teacher training institutions that use spreadsheet and paper-based systems. Survey respondents determined that the system prototype could meet important data collection, analysis, and reporting needs and could increase reporting and data retrieval efficiency for teacher evaluators and teacher training institutions. Target user evaluations found the system to be useable, functionally adequate, and a useful assessment tool.