The development of an innovative approach to the improvement of college teaching is described. The main objective was to develop a practical diagnostic observation and reporting system for student description of college teaching. A total of 120 professors participated in identifying seven general teaching objectives considered satisfactory for describing undergraduate course objectives. Data were also collected from 402 instructors and 12,792 students at 10 agriculture colleges in the Northeast to determine the correlations between the presence of 45 low-inference teaching behaviors and the degree of student achievement as measured by students' ratings of their progress on each of the seven general teaching objectives. The findings show that 28 specific, low-inference, observable teaching behaviors correlated at the level of .48 or higher with student achievement on one or more of the general teaching objectives and were classified by the researchers as effective at the college level . Four main products were generated by the study: an Instructor Form, a Student Form, a computer Instructor's Printout, and the required computer programs for use in processing the data on standard electronic equipment. These products are applicable for staff development programs. (Author/LBH)