Measuring Teaching Effectiveness with Behavioral Scales: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales or BARS have been used to measure teaching effectiveness in different stages, programs, and instruction modalities. The author’s purpose in this article is twofold: to examine, to date, the use of BARS in the educational setting for the assessment of teacher performance and to demonstrate the possibilities of using this type of instruments in the near future. To do so, the author examines the publications on this issue by conducting a systematic literature review in two distinct phases. In the first phase, queries of different key terms are made in the Web of Science (WOS) database. This is followed by a second phase in which the title, abstract, and keywords of each publication are manually examined. The findings reveal an increase in the use of BARS in recent years providing evidence on the high potential for application of this type of instrument for the appraisal of teaching effectiveness. The author concludes that research on the use of BARS for the evaluation of teacher performance is not only an emerging line of study, but also a topic that invites the academic community to reflect on which mechanisms are most appropriate when dealing with a serious task, in the context of educational organization, such as the appraisal of teaching effectiveness. The originality of this work lies in being the first systematic literature review on the use of BARS for the assessment of teacher performance in the educational setting.