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As higher education institutions (HEIs) strive to provide a comprehensive learning environment, teaching effectiveness becomes critical in ensuring positive educational outcomes (Fauth et al., 2019). High-quality teaching in universities extends beyond the mere transmission of knowledge (Sun et al., 2017); it encompasses a range of pedagogical practices, instructional strategies, and support mechanisms that facilitate student engagement and thinking (Madani, 2019). By examining various dimensions of teaching quality, from teacher-centered factors to institutional support (Lim & Ho, 2022), researchers gain insights into the vital role universities play in nurturing the intellectual growth of students (Paul & Nayagam, 2018); these insights become critical in the design of effective measures for upholding teaching quality. Thus, HEIs need to push for an environment that promotes a learning mode that ensures lifelong education, guaranteeing their stability and relevance (Abbas, 2020).
Over the years, researchers and practitioners have long been challenged to list the most impactful driving factors behind high-quality instruction (Praetorius et al., 2018). With the same objective, several studies (e.g., Cho & Baek, 2019; Nalipay et al., 2023; Fan & Shum, 2023; Phung et al., 2024) have identified factors that significantly impact the teaching quality in HEIs. These factors include individual characteristics of the teachers (Cho & Baek, 2019), psychological characteristics (Nalipay et al., 2023), self-efficacy (Daumiller et al., 2021), teaching motivation (Siostrom et al., 2023), teaching experience (Podolsky et al., 2019; Graham et al., 2020), professional development (Vermunt et al., 2019; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017), student composition (Dietrich & Cohen, 2021), students’ feedback (Lazarides & Buchholz, 2019), institutional culture (Lebelo, 2021), and institutional resources (Shattuck, 2014).
Although teaching quality is a popular domain in the literature, an in-depth holistic assessment of the factors that influence it remains a gap. Several teaching-quality frameworks proposed by various studies (e.g., Mamites et al., 2022; Cappella et al., 2016) differ in focus, level of abstraction, and subject-relatedness. Recently, Mamites et al. (2022) analyzed the causal relationship between the factors influencing teaching quality in public HEIs in the Philippines and identified the crucial factors between them. Using the neutrosophic decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), the study revealed that individual characteristics, psychological characteristics, and institutional culture are key factors in teaching quality, while institutional resources and student composition are minor factors. While DEMATEL models the causal relationships among these factors and eventually identifies the critical factors, a structured model representing a hierarchy that aids in better decision-making is a relevant gap in the domain literature.