Abstract:

Students are a key element in the educational process. Consequently, their opinions, perceptions and feedbacks are an important input for the assessment of different aspects of the process and for informing the decision making regarding the implementation of improvement measures. Students’ voices and views must be seen as centrally important to the development of knowledge about teaching in higher education. The importance of engaging students as co-producers of knowledge about pedagogy and practice in higher education in order to provide deeper and richer layers of understanding must be recognized.

One of the main purposes for which the students’ feedback is collected is the teaching quality assessment. In almost all cases, formal measurement of course quality is conducted through course evaluations completed by students at the end of the course. Nevertheless, for improving the students’ perceptions of the teaching quality, it is important to determine first what the students expect before entering the course. Obtaining feedback at the end of a course could not benefit the respondents themselves. Earlier feedback would have a more immediate value. Moreover, administering a questionnaire at the beginning of a course asking the students the importance they give to different aspects of teaching, would allow to find out their opinions regarding the different aspects abstractly, without linking it to the performance of a particular lecturer.

Results obtained from the survey instrument would help lecturers to improve the quality of their teaching by providing insights into the factors that students perceive as more relevant for determining the quality of teaching. Taking this information into account lecturers can do a better programming of the different aspects of the course and prepare the subjects more effectively, which is likely to positively impact student satisfaction which, in turn, has been related to an improvement in students’ performance.

In this context, a questionnaire was designed and administered to second year students of the Degree in Economics and the Degree in Economics and Tourism in the University of the Balearic Islands. The survey instrument included an adaptation of the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) [1] along with questions about sociodemographic and academic characteristics of students, such as, gender, age, studies. The usual objective of the SEEQ is the assessment, for a specific subject, of the teacher's performance at the end of the course. Therefore, the writing of the items that make up the SEEQ scale was adapted to be administered at the beginning of the course to gather the opinion of the students about the importance of each of the aspects to determine the quality of teaching in general.

The analysis of the survey data show which are the aspects that students consider more relevant for determining the teaching quality of a course, along with those that are not considered so important. Differences of students’ opinions on the different aspects in terms of three characteristics were analysed: gender, expected grade of the course and prior interest in the subject. Results reveal the existence of differences in the importance that students give to the different aspects depending on these characteristics.

References:
[1] H. W. Marsh, “SEEQ: A reliable, valid, and useful instrument for collecting students’ evaluations of university teaching,” Br. J. Educ. Psychol., vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 77–95, Feb. 1982.

Keywords:

Quality of teaching, students opinions, questionnare.