Investigating the Effect of Teaching Aesthetic Skills to Faculty Members on Development of Their Effective Teaching Performance1

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effect of teaching aesthetic skills to faculty members on development of their effective teaching performance through a two-group pretest-posttest design. The sample included 32 faculty members at a major Iranian university who were divided into the experimental (11 participants) and control groups (21 participants). The experimental group was taught to use aesthetic skills in the teaching and learning processes; however, no intervention was applied to the control group. To evaluate the effective teaching performance of the faculty members, a tailor-made questionnaire was used in two pretest and posttest stages, where randomly chosen students were asked to express their opinions about the faculty membersí performance. The sample size of the students was 1096 in the pretest stage and 935 in the posttest stage. Paired t-test results showed that there was no significant difference between the mean effective teaching scores of the faculty members in the control group in the pretest stage and in the posttest stage. However, the mean effective teaching scores of the faculty members in the experimental group were found to be significantly higher in the posttest. In addition, although there was no significant difference between the mean effective teaching scores of the two faculty groups in the pretest, faculty members in the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in the control group. Based on the findings, applying aesthetic skills by faculty members in the teaching and learning processes can pave the way for sustainable development of their effective teaching performance. Therefore, faculty members are recommended to acquire the required knowledge and skills to better use aesthetic skills in the teaching process.