College students' self-insight and common implicit theories in rating of teaching effectiveness.

The objectives of this study were to determine whether (a) students have self-insight into how they make overall evaluations of teaching effectiveness, and (b) there is a reasonably high level of consensus among the student raters in making overall evaluations. A policy-capturing approach was used with 3 different college student groups (94 introductory geology, 82 accounting, and 53 graduate education students) to determine the implicit and explicit weights of the teaching factors students used in arriving at their overall evaluations. The results indicated that the students had self-insight and a reasonably high level of consensus in making their overall evaluations, providing further evidence of the validity of students' overall evaluations of teaching effectiveness.