In recent years, the emphasis upon teaching quality in higher education has increased. Government-driven initiatives have placed a responsibility upon universities to put in place formal methods to ensure that teaching quality is regularly assessed. The primary impetus for encouraging teachers to improve their own teaching effectiveness is the ?Student Evaluation of Teaching' (SET) exercise. This is a process where students on taught courses offer their own assessment of the teaching quality; this information is collated centrally and fed back to the teacher and Head of School. There is an inherent assumption in the system that SET is able to fulfil its role in evaluating teaching quality and in encouraging change.

This project aimed to investigate whether this assumption is well-founded. Two on-line questionnaires were distributed to staff and students at the University of Nottingham and used to explore three key questions; 1. How is SET used by lecturers and students? 2. How do lecturers and students perceive SET? and 3. Is SET being implemented as intended?

The staff cohort (n = 204) represented all the major career stages within the University: in particular, lecturers and senior lecturers made up 60% of the cohort. Similarly, the student cohort (n = 758) represented each of the study years. Participants were from 24 different schools across the University of Nottingham .

Preliminary analysis suggested that there were clear differences in how staff and students perceive and use SET e.g. when considering which factors were important considerations to staff, students rated ?To fulfil government requirements? significantly more highly than did staff themselves, whereas staff rated ?To maintain/improve teaching standards? and ?To Initiate student-staff dialogue? as being significantly more important than did students.

Regarding the implementation of SET, we found that staff thought that they themselves were adhering to the guidelines significantly more often than the students thought they were, in terms of setting aside sufficient time for students to fill in the forms, feeding back information to students and using a student representative to collect and return forms. Staff also felt that they were more likely to set aside sufficient time for filling in SET forms than were the rest of the staff in their school.

Generally, we found that the students perceived the SET process in a more positive light than staff, rating the system significantly more highly overall. Potentially, this reflects our finding that students rated the evaluation of teaching as being significantly more important than staff did.

Overall, these data highlight that there are differences between how staff and students perceive and use SET. These data also demonstrate that potentially the SET guidelines are not being adhered to perhaps undermining the initial goals of SET. At the very least our data provides support for a reassessment of the SET procedure. Further analysis of our dataset will give greater insights into our three key questions and will be reported at the conference.

The use of anonymous questionnaires has proven to be a useful tool in the current study, however potentially interviewing a cross section of staff and students may have added more depth to the study.