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Olsen, D. & Simmons, A. "Enhancing Satisfaction
with Teaching: Restructuring Rewards"
By Dr. Ken Hunt
Paper read at Association for Institutional Research, Boston, May 1995, 18 pp.
In a study of the aspects of teaching that are most intrinsically rewarding and most stressful, 114 faculty members were interviewed about teaching satisfaction, teaching stress, student feedback, usefulness of student feedback to teaching, departmental support, intellectual challenge, office hours, student contact, and teaching methods. Correlation's between teaching satisfaction and faculty-student contact measures indicated that satisfaction increased as faculty members used more active learning strategies, spent more time in office hours and in class, and had more students come to office hours. Teaching satisfaction was also associated with receiving positive student evaluations and finding student evaluations useful in instruction, with receiving peer evaluations of one’s teaching, with number of efforts to improve teaching, and with having high expectations for students’ academic performance.
Teaching satisfaction was regressed on each of four categories of variables (faculty-student contact, student feedback, support from colleagues and administrators, and sense of intellectual challenge), along with instructor gender, rank, and discipline. The results indicated that instructor rank, faculty-student contact, the summative teaching evaluation of peers and students, and the perceived utility of student feedback were the best predictors of teaching satisfaction. Teaching stress and formal or informal institutional rewards and recognition had little relationship to teaching satisfaction. The findings suggest that institutions could increase faculty members’ satisfaction by training them to use instructional techniques that connect teacher and students, to incorporate student feedback into instruction, and to apply research findings to improve teaching methods, thereby increasing the intellectual challenge of teaching. (25 ref)—Office of Academic Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington.
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