Conceptualising Higher-Education Teacher Excellence for More Inclusive and Sustainable Evaluation: An Exploratory Sequential Mixed-Methods Study

Higher-education teacher excellence is widely regarded as a key dimension of educational quality, yet the ways it is commonly evaluated are often only weakly aligned with its multidimensional nature. A necessary step towards fair, inclusive, and sustainable quality assurance is therefore to specify what counts as excellence before attempting to measure it. In this context, the present study examined how university teachers conceptualise excellence and what these accounts imply for evaluation design. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, Study 1 elicited teachers’ accounts of excellence through a focus group with pedagogy and didactics experts (n = 7) and interviews with experienced university teachers from other disciplinary backgrounds (n = 5), yielding eight conceptual domains and a 95-item pool. In Study 2, a self-selected sample of 261 university teachers from a comprehensive university across disciplinary fields rated the importance of each item. Dimensionality analysis yielded an interpretable six-dimensional role-based structure of higher-education teacher excellence. The findings suggest that higher-education teacher excellence is unlikely to be adequately represented by student-only ratings or other narrow indicators. Rather, the results indicate the need for a multisource approach to evaluating higher-education teacher excellence, in which sources of evidence are aligned with the facets of excellence that different raters can legitimately observe, with implications for more inclusive and sustainable quality assurance in higher education.