BECE. Newsletter 

Vol.10, No.2, 2022 1419 

 

 

 

 

Can Increasing Teaching Rewards Improve Teaching 

Quality? An Empirical Study of 63 Universities 

Across the Country 

By Li, N., & Tao, Z. Y. 
Correspondence to: Nan Li, Capital University of Economics and Business. E-

mail: linan@cueb.edu.cn  

LTHOUGH teaching and scientific research are both important tasks 

for college and university teachers, the phenomenon of emphasizing 

scientific research over teaching prevails. In the evaluation system, universi-

ties tend to give more weight to scientific research. As a result, teachers’ sci-

entific research achievements are linked with their appointment, assessment, 

promotion, and salaries; insufficient attention to teaching leads to low teach-

ing quality. This study explores the effect of teaching incentives on teaching 

quality improvement by comparing the teaching incentives in different uni-

versities. Ordinary least squares are used to estimate the effect of teaching 

incentives on academic evaluation of teaching performance. The results are 

as follows. 

 The number of teaching rewards itself does not have a significant 

effect on students’ evaluation of teachers’ performance.  

 When teaching is rewarded more than scientific research, teachers 

will invest more time and energy in teaching, and the number of 

teaching awards will increase, which will raise the student evalua-

tion scores. When the weight of teaching in the academic title 

evaluation increases, teachers will pay more attention to teaching 

for the purpose of being promoted, which in turn will increase the 

student evaluation scores. 

Given the above results, the study makes several recommendations. 

Scientific research has been taking a dominant position in teachers’ careers 

in most universities. If we do not change the research-oriented culture, simp-

ly increasing teaching incentives will not promote the teaching quality. Only 

when teaching has a higher position than research can teaching quality be 

improved. Additionally, the ‘quality’ of teaching should be emphasized ra-

ther than the ‘quantity.’ Increasing the weight of teaching in the academic ti-

tle system is an effective way to improve the quality of teaching. 

 

Source: Open Education Research, 2021; 2021(6):53-60. 

A 

mailto:linan@cueb.edu.cn