Performance Measures–Compensation for Research and Teaching Outcomes in the Higher Education System The Case of Israel–A Comparative View

Teachers in academia are usually not required to have teacher training but must often be evaluated by their
students, who expect them to have much better teaching qualifications than their high school teachers. However,
teachers in elementary and high schools are required to go through several years of teacher-training, resulting in
a teaching certificate, which is usually mandatory in the secondary school system. This anomaly causes great
tension in colleges and universities, and often results in pressure to "improve" teaching evaluation in regard to
academic level. In many countries, a doctorate degree in any field automatically allows its holder to teach in
academic institutions, because the students are expected to learn on their own, while the professor is the expert,
responsible for helping with complicated questions. These discrepancies often hamper the advances of higher
education. This paper presents the situation of teaching in higher education in selected countries, while
presenting various paradigms for improving the state of teaching in higher education. The aim is to study the
methodologies used to assess the quality of teaching in higher education systems in general and in Israel
specifically.