Research needs to assess the effectiveness of different teaching behaviours against various skills for innovation.
Despite the substantial amount of research on effective teaching behaviours, higher education literature on measures of inclination to inquire, lifelong learning, and intellectual development is limited (Loes, Saichaie, Padgett and Pascarella, 2012).
The typical cognitive criteria for student achievement underlying teacher effectiveness studies are final examination tests – including multiple choice and/or true/false questions testing declarative knowledge on which students are graded. They tend to assess student learning with regard to lower-level educational objectives such as memory of facts and definitions rather than high-level outcomes such as critical thinking and problem solving.
Yet, the way in which knowledge is structured as well as skills and strategies for learning and problem solving are becoming more and more important (Feldman, 2007, pp. 109-110).
Students’ motivation for learning and cognitive processes are also affected by teaching behaviours – for instance, teacher enthusiasm can enhance student attention, teacher clarity can aid encoding and interaction/rapport can encourage active student participation in the classroom to support deep learning. Due to affordances of a knowledge economy and society an educational objective-shift towards the acquisition of “’adaptive competence,’ i.e. the ability to apply meaningfully-learned knowledge and skills flexibility and creatively in different situations” is taking place (De Corte, 2010, p. 45).
Thus, new evaluation approaches for formative assessment with regard to various skills for innovation are needed –in addition to summative assessment of different educational objectives.