Abstract:

Plethora of research has been done on evaluating students’ learning experience at course-level, however, that on programme-level is rather scant (Kember and Leung, 2009). Since students’ overall experience of a programme or degree, that constitutes the ‘learning environment’, is more than the sum of their experience in individual courses. Learning environment is conceptualized in a much broader term to include ‘the social, psychological and pedagogical contexts’ (Fraser, 1998, p.3) that a course-level student feedback questionnaire may not suffice for the evaluation of such.

The current study aims at assessing students’ total experience at programme-level for quality assurance purpose. A locally validated instrument, Student Engagement Questionnaire, was used to test two major objectives. First, it was expected that our associate degree programmes would have a positive impact on students’ development and learning and therefore it was hypothesized that higher year student (Year 1 Semester One vs Year 1 Semester One vs. Graduates) would perceive themselves to have better generic attributes than that of their lower year counterparts. Second, the cross-sectional data of this study allows meaningful exploratory comparison among the three participating programmes (Marketing, Engineering and Sociology) in terms of their key strengths and weaknesses.

One thousand three hundred and sixty-eight associate degree students from a community in Hong Kong participated voluntarily in this study during the academic year of 2009-2010. Student Engagement Questionnaire (Kember and Leung, 2009) was translated, adapted and administered to three cohort of students from three different academic programmes. All items were rated in a 5-point Likert scale. The 27 items in the scale can be clustered into 13 theoretically-driven dimensions, and namely they are: Critical Thinking, Adaptability, Self-managed learning, Problem-solving skills, Communication skills, Interpersonal and Group presentation skills, Computer literacy, Active learning, Teaching for understanding, Feedback to assist learning, Assessment, Teaching-student relationship and Student-student relationship.

Reliability of the thirteen dimensions is satisfactory. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) shows that the scores of the 13 dimensions were significantly different across three cohorts; and post-hoc tests suggest that students from higher year of study perceived themselves to have better generic competences as well as to be more engaged in their teaching and learning environment than their lower year counterparts. Furthermore, MANOVA also shows a statistically significant programme effect. Post-hoc tests reveal that students from different programmes perceived themselves to have different strengths; also different programmes seemed to have different profile of strengths and weaknesses in their teaching and learning environment and use of pedagogies.

It is concluded that Student Engagement Questionnaire (SEQ) is empirically reliable and practically useful for assessing students’ learning experience and characterizing associate degree programme features in Hong Kong. Both of these functions aid programme management team to assess value-addedness of the programme on students’ development in an evidence-based and empirical manner, which aligns well with the latest shift to an outcome-based approach to quality assurance in Hong Kong (Spady, 1994).

Keywords:

Student Engagement Questionnaire, Learning Environment, Associate Degree Programmes, Quality Assurance.