Considering the SWOT Analysis of Teacher Evaluation by Students

Aims: This study is based on this vision that teacher evaluation is an integral part of any educational system as well as a part of the educational feedback loops that serves to enhance the teaching and learning processes. Thus, The objective of the current study refers to investigate the SWOT analysis of teacher evaluation by students that practicality affects teaching improvement in educational process. Study Design: This survey is a descriptivecross sectional research study. Place and Duration of Study: By considering that there are various methods for teacher evaluation, this survey used students' perspective in spite of much controversy about the use of only students' evaluation about teaching process. Methodology: Since, students, as direct evaluators in rating their teachers, score various aspects of teachers’ achievement from multi-dimensional perspectives such as "classroom environment management", "planning instruction and designing learning", "giving sufficient instruction", "engaging" and "supporting students in learning and professionalism" via a five-point Likert scale Original Research Article Nekoueizadeh et al.; BJESBS, 13(4): 1-11, 2016; Article no.BJESBS.10937 2 questionnaire that rates from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (no idea). To this end, the correlation of independent variables, such as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) and open ended question, embedded at the end of developed questionnaire, as dependent variable makes an excellent opportunity in determining to what extent the desired goals of education performance have been achieved. Results: Although many factors may affect the results of the student survey, questionnaire reliability was separately calculated by Alpha Cronbach coefficient for confirming internal consistency of each question and its validity from three aspects of construct validity (factor analysis), concurrent validity and content validity. The Data analysis was done by SPSS-18 software, Independent samples T-test, and Pearson Correlation. The results of this survey show that the accuracy of collected data is affected by the other educational context factors than only individual teacher performance. Conclusion: Therefore, it should be used integrated evaluation instruments from only students' perspective as noble savage learners for improving validity of teacher evaluation.


INTRODUCTION
As a matter of fact, teacher plays an important role in educational system. The adequacy and efficiency of the pedagogical program is largely depended on ensuring that teachers are highly experienced, well-knowledge and motivated for performing methodological issues at their best. In turn, the effectiveness of teaching has positive impact on student achievement and educational system evaluation. By considering that no universal definition of effective teaching exists [1]. Several studies have attempted to discover the dimensions of effective teaching. For example, [2] identified the factors of good teaching as (1) clear instructional presentation and (2) management of student behavior. A few years later, [3] suggested that the characteristics of effective teaching are (1) intellectual excitement and (2) interpersonal rapport, while [4] cited three characteristics of effective teachers: (1) caring, (2) systematic, and (3) stimulating. Likewise, [5] claimed that effective teachers must demonstrate (1) respect for students, (2) organize and present skills, and (3) the ability to challenge students. Thus, it could be inferred that there has not been any well-defined agenda yet that based on which design a comprehensive questionnaire in order to reflect all dimensions of effective teaching for evaluation. One of the most common methods for monitoring education systems in most countries, especially in Iran, is done by students for highlighting the innovative steps which lead to improve education quality. Therefore, according to some authors, assessment of teachers by students as evaluators is best tangible evaluation resource , but researchers also have implied that different factors such as the emotional state of students [6]; circumstantial variables including class time, class size, subject area, and course workload [7,8]; gender bias [9,10,11,12]; instructor expressiveness [13,14]; subject matter [15,16]; engaged and motivated students in comparison with lower grade students [17,18], etc. affects the result validity of the analyzed filled questionnaires.
On the other hand, based on literature studies, teacher evaluation has positive impact on teaching and learning processes and educational context because teachers are personally responsible for their students and drive the steps to raise educational standards. Therefore, school teaching staff evaluation, teacher evaluation and student performance results are interlinked together for improvement plans of education.
In this way, teacher evaluation is considered to be an important point in the educational system in spite of it has not systematically structured yet and implemented through informal mechanisms because some aspects of its validity have not be studied. In real, the implementation of effective and comprehensive teacher evaluation is a difficult task. Universities and centers of higher education use student ratings as one of the most common methods of teacher evaluation for some purposes such as improving teaching effectiveness (i.e., formative evaluation) and personnel decisions (i.e., summative evaluative functions) [19]. It is obvious that teacher evaluation by students is useful and abridged way for monitoring educational system in order to improve the quality of educational processes or promote the function of particular institution. On the other hand, many concerns about administrators' use of student ratings have been expressed [20], particularly if these ratings are the sole source of instructor evaluation in regard to decisions about hiring, promotion, retention, and/or tenure.
Few studies have been conducted on how filled out questionnaires by students in an educational system may practicality affect teacher training and teaching improvement. Therefore, there are particular gaps about advantages and disadvantages use of teacher evaluating via filled out questionnaire by students in an educational system.
Since, the aim of this study is to make an excellent opportunity for considerate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of using the elicited data that collected via filled out questionnaires by students on the teacher evaluation. A SWOT analysis, as a planned method, can be applied for an education, business or individually in any decision-making situation when a desired endstate (objective) has been defined. The SWOT analysis is credited to Albert Humphrey in the 1960s and 1970s using data from top companies. Implementation of SWOTs is advised in any context because they can lead administrators to plan later steps in achieving better objectives. The SWOT method, as an assessment technique in identifying not only the weaknesses and threats, but also the strengths and opportunities factors that may affect performance of an individual or organization, can typically be applied to provide an outline for focusing on strengths, minimizing threats, and taking the greatest possible advantage of opportunities available to make best decisionmaking. Thus, Users of SWOT analyses need to ask and answer questions that generate meaningful information for each category (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) to make the analysis useful and find their competitive advantage.
The S.W.O.T. is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that refers to: Strengths: Provides an area to list everything done right for project.
Weaknesses: Contains needed improvements within a project to remedy the identified weak issues.
Opportunities: Shows any elements in any project to exploit its improvement.
Threats: Determines any elements in the surrounding environment that make trouble for project.
The researchers hope that the findings of this research can be a little role in enriching quality of any educational system by giving constructive feedback to each teacher staff about his/her strengths and weaknesses that lead him/her to continuous improvement for raising student achievement with emphasis on managing meaningful, accurate implementation and analysis teacher evaluation by students for obtaining a reliable and valid result.

Research Question
To what extent the collected data via filled out questionnaires by students in an educational system are generalizable for teacher evaluation?

Research Hypothesis
There is significant and demonstrate concern about fairness and consistency the maximize use of teacher evaluation by only students as direct evaluators for improving educational objectives.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
This study is a descriptive-cross sectional.

Instrument
A five-point Likert scale questionnaire -ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (no idea)-, as a common research instrument in educational system, was used in this study to consider teacher evaluation from multi-dimensional perspectives such as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) by students as direct evaluators.
In addition, the questionnaire as had an open ended question in order to engage students to reflect their overall personal viewpoints by giving a score to evaluate their teachers. Thus, the developed questionnaire was a combination of 'closed' and 'open' questions. The questions in the questionnaire were divided into five groups such as "classroom environment management", "planning instruction and designing learning", "giving sufficient instruction", "engaging" and "supporting students in learning and professionalism" for better analyzing collected data via students in order to consider SWOT analysis of teacher evaluation.
Content and face validity of this research instrument was done by committee members and some experts in this field. Questionnaire reliability was separately calculated by Alpha Cronbach coefficient for each question of questionnaire templates. Based on the results of this test and the correlation coefficient, some questions were eliminated and some others were modified. In general, the reliability of questionnaire was 0.80.

Participants
Participants of this study consist of 12 lectures in university, both male and female, that their degree level ranges from MA to PhD in TEFL, English Literature, linguistics, and their experience in teaching ranges from 5 to 10 years. On the other hand, 60 TEFL students as direct evaluators for gathering information, who half of them had passed or failed at least two courses during a semester with the defined twelve lecturers, were involved in filling out designed questionnaires.

Data Analysis
Partakers' opinion ranked 30-item, likert scale questionnaire choices in an order of completely agree (score: 1) to no idea (score: 5) in a manner which best described their opinions about teacher achievement in five main areas as mentioned above. Consequently, after completing the questionnaire, the findings related to each of the questions in the Likert items were counted and percent of each option (regarding Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Treat aspects of teacher evaluation) was calculated to make a correlation with open ended question that embedded at the end of developed questionnaire that engaged students to reflect their direct viewpoints about their teacher achievement.
Accordingly, inferential statistics like correlation-Cronbach alpha, Pearson correlation, independent T-test and Pearson Correlation were used for analyzing of statement in figures (Figs. 1 and 2 inside the text) to analyze the data that will run by using SPSS version 18.

RESULTS
In this view that difficulties in implementation of teacher evaluation due to the nature and complexity of its evaluation, this survey has been designed in this order to consider multidimensional of students' viewpoints involving in judging teacher quality and performance as key driver and direct feedback to improve the quality of educational system. It should be mentioned that why this survey intended to consider the SWOT analysis of teacher evaluation via students is raises from this concept that there is an additional emphasis on the role of students as direct evaluators in educational system in providing each instructor's strengths and weaknesses that pave the way to make decision about promotion, professional development and constructive feedback in more thoughtful manner to raise educational improvement.    This table shows the comparison between the filled questionnaire by students who passed and failed their semester. Obviously, the results show that the passed and failed students don't have the same idea about their teachers. Thus, it is clearly demonstrated that the failed students didn't answer fairly (P < 0.05). We used Independent Samples T-test for this test because their answers were independent. (Ti) is the nth of teachers.
It is clear that most students viewpoints', as direct group receiving educational materials, are considered true and valid and reliable source about teacher evaluation, but is sometimes affected self-interest that itself is related to different factors existed in the educational context which is not directly related to professional qualification, academic and personal characteristics of their teachers or educational goals. Hence, it is hard to vouch for the legitimacy of selected students as assessors in this evaluation research process who passed or failed the courses taught by the selected teachers in spite of the reliability and validity of this evaluation result is inherently depends on sense of fairness as outstanding characteristic of the assessors' legitimacy. Therefore, Teacher evaluation via students is unfair because it is influenced by many factors such as student's own skills, expectations, motivation, the influence of their peer group, the influence of the former teachers and the other factors include school organization, educational context and climate, and curriculum structure and content. In other words, it can be explicitly, based on previous studies, said that teacher evaluation by students is more likelihood relevant to whole-school evaluation than his/her individual teacher performance. The Table 4 shows that the correlation between the sum scores obtained from the filled out questionnaires by students, who successfully passed the semester and students' final scores on the questionnaires. Pearson correlation is 0.027 and P=0.886>0.05 that indicates that there is a very weak correlation between two variables and not influenced on each other.
It should be mentioned that the effectiveness of teacher evaluation will be jeopardized only by students because they are untrained evaluators and blindly evaluate teachers only based on surface teaching structure without enough competence in some aspects such as not having sufficient knowledge about nature and concepts of teaching theories and methodologies; lack of awareness the psychological impact of their evaluation; unfamiliarity with the dimensions of effective teaching; defensive educational culture of evaluation, etc.
Consequently, this study, by considering that teacher evaluation is a need and must in educational system, intends to shed some light on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of teacher evaluation by students in virtual and practical educational system. The Table 5 also shows that column Sum-2 is the sum scores from filled out questionnaires by students who failed their course but column score-2 shows that students' final scores on the questionnaires have been based solely on personal prejudiced opinion. Here P=0.935>0.05 that can be said that there is a very weak correlation between the sum scores from filled out questionnaire and the final score.
For obtaining a reliable and valid evaluation, the effective operation of teacher evaluation depends on a great extent on the way that evaluation is implemented in educational context as developmental process not as a bureaucratic device. SWOT analysis of teacher evaluation is internally and externally related to school evaluation because students judge the performance of a school entirely that means all of dimensions of educational context will be measured without posing enough knowledge about pedagogic and course contents and aims.
On the other hand, surely questionnaire as an assessment form consisting of a few items that students' rate on a five-point scale at the end of a semester may not accurately measure the complexity and multidimensional aspects of effective teaching. Therefore, it should be considered that only reliance on student evaluation via questionnaire or interview to measure teaching effectiveness is quick and unreliable source that lead to distanced, demoralizing, and even disreputable evaluation. Another limitation of this study refers to its crosssectional nature that it should be implemented several times in two semesters (at least once at mid-term and once at the end of term) for reflecting whole picture of students' thoughts in the evaluation process in order to access reliable and valid SWOT analysis of teacher evaluation. Finally, by integrating students in teacher evaluation process as an educational diagnosis device into educational system through thinkaloud procedure not as a bureaucratic device for assessing strengths and weaknesses of instructors causes to simultaneously enhance the quality of educational context and effective teaching.

DISCUSSION
It should be considered that evaluating individual teacher in specified school context has this advantage that all aspects of that educational context objective are previously determined against standard education-references.
Even though teacher evaluation via questionnaire is implemented base on standard education-references.it should be considered all different factors are involved in the development and implementation of teacher evaluation and assessment processes to obtain a valid and reliable evaluation for improving teaching quality. As the literature supports this claim that variable factors such as class time, class size, content subject, and the difficulty of course affect fairness and validity student evaluations of teaching. Unfortunately, few studies have been dedicated to design a useful questionnaire, how to administer it in educational system, and how engage effectively participants of a research in filling out questionnaires in order to have practicality positive effect on teacher training and teaching improvement.
Therefore, there are particular gaps in literature about SWOT analysis use of evaluating teacher via questionnaire in educational system for better education. In this research, assessment of teachers is placed on four or five performances which are reflected in the designed questionnaire as opposed to binary ratings that limit the evaluator to choosing between "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory".
Academic and scientific characteristics of teachers are not considered by students in their teacher evaluation because integrating questionnaire, as research instrument into entire aspects of educational context, is troublesome and time-consuming task. In this way, the last question in the questionnaire is designed to embed the blanked issues which are not mentioned in designed questionnaire. Thus, by making a correlation between all aspects reflected in the questionnaire and the latest question makes an integrative evaluation to the entire educational context and links to provide effective feedback to teaching achievement.
On the other hand, teacher evaluation, that aims to show the teacher success in achieving educational goals, is likelihood accompany with students' personal prejudice perspectives and depend on their obtained scores that lead to underestimated the validation and reliability of research result in spite of emphasis on sincerity of their view while filling out questionnaire. Therefore, high quality teacher evaluation is rigorously related to meaningfully engage trained and fairness evaluators to measure each question appropriately.
Additionally, responses in questionnaires are given anonymously, so students are more willing to freely express what they actually think and perceive about the quality of teaching because teacher achievement cannot be inferred only from test results. Hence, outstanding aim of this research refers to consider Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of teacher evaluation by receiving students' view as outreach group and direct weightier in educational system that lead to improve educational quality in a more thoughtful manner via constructive feedback.

Strengths
-Having practicality effect on teacher training and teaching improvement -Implemented base on standard references -Based on that educational context objective -Capturing important information about the quality of teacher's instruction -As quick instrument reference for inferring the most problematic aspects of teacher's instruction -Accessibility to consider the quality of the other components of educational system by teacher evaluation as an integrated part.

Weaknesses
-Not consisted of different factors that are involve in the development and implementation of teacher evaluation and assessment processes -Incomplete reflect the multiple dimension of teaching activity -Not accurately measure the complexity and multidimensionality of effective teaching -Not complete reference for measuring teaching effectiveness based on student evaluations.
-No existence universal standard criterion for designing a reliable and valid questionnaire for teacher evaluation -Not make a real connection between theory and what happened in real context for teacher evaluation -Deemed not valid and reliable reference for teacher evaluation.

Opportunities
-Describing achievable agenda to improve educational system -Selecting more robust teacher who they are compatible to education quality -Providing a more complete picture of teacher's proficiency level that contributes to student learning -Providing more information about how much a teacher has role in students' success -Provide valuable information about effective strategies that teacher use for improving of his/her instructional -Creating opportunities for teachers to show to some extent he/she is successful in teaching process -Providing greater insight into how much his/her instruction is effective -Giving a more comprehensive view of teacher's strengths and areas where he/she needs improvement -A means for teaching evaluation process in order to improve teaching -Getting appropriate feedback from students' viewpoints can help improve instruction -Causing to enhance competencies as well as resources and means to improve practice -A non-threatening evaluation context in contrast with the other evaluation instrument such as classroom observation and structured interviews -Teacher evaluation is integrated with quality assurance -An independent and objective assessment of the teacher's performance; -Every student has clear assessment with regard to all aspects of a teacher's performance

Threats
-Preparation of reliable and valid questionnaire is work loading activity -Student's evaluation results is affected by instructor characteristics -Student's emotional state will be threatened the validity of teacher evaluation -Incorrectly interpreting the results from filled out questionnaire -Choice of the ineligible administrative group that undertake the implementation process effectively -Threating situation in filling out questionnaires by students -Difficulty in getting permission from educational system for running a questionnaire -Hindrance factors involving in the development and implementation of a questionnaire -Illiteracy of participants about the aim or scope of a questionnaire for filling out of it -Ill-formed questionnaire, in which poorly worded or inappropriate items are existed, leads to not useful information -Ill-defined assortment of items in a questionnaire will not properly reflect the aim or the content of a questionnaire -Instructor characteristics that influence student evaluation results that leads to unreliable scores -In addition to physical appearance and leniency gender, race also contribute to biases that negate the validity of a questionnaire -Student's expectation of a course and its instructor is the single most important factor that influences teacher evaluations -The students' unfair biases skew teacher assessment results -Emotional state of students affects the validity of the results from a filled out questionnaire.

CONCLUSION
As a matter of fact, SWOT analysis, by highlighting strengths/weaknesses and both opportunities and threats factors, is practically used in any organization to achieve its ending objectives. Thus, SWOT Analysis is not only limited to in any decision-making situation but also be used in creating a recommendation for better planning in later steps.
By considering the previous published studies and the result of this study can be easily showed that Strengths and Weaknesses of teacher evaluation by students often refer to internal context of education, while opportunities and threats generally relate to external factors. In this way, by integrating evaluating teachers via students into educational context not only cause to enhance the quality of the educational value by judging professional members, who pose the appropriate knowledge and skill for teaching affairs, but also emphasize on their strengths and weaknesses in order to continue their professional growth and development.