IS STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE AFFECTED BY TEACHING QUALITY AND STUDENT ONLINE FEEDBACK?

The impact of two factors – lecturers’ teaching quality and students’ online feedback – on students’ academic performance (that is, cumulative grade point average or CGPA) has not been sufficiently studied. At Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Malaysia, lecturers’ teaching quality has been measured through teaching portfolio evaluation (TPE) and students’ online feedback has been measured through Students’ Feedback Online (or SuFo). Evaluation of teaching and students’ feedback provide evidence for measuring quality as they can be used to support initiatives to improve teaching quality. Nonetheless, universities have to exercise caution as the use of quantitative instrument is affected by organizational constraints. Even though many students and academician believe that teaching evaluation and students’ feedback are useful and informative, many academician and institutions do not take teaching evaluation and students’ feedback very seriously. The main problems include the interpretation of the teaching evaluation and students’ feedback on the part of both academician and students. With the aim to remedy the problems, this correlational study is carried out to investigate the relationships between, first, the teaching quality and students’ performance, and then, the student online feedback and students’ performance at UiTM Sarawak, Mukah Campus. The sample consists of all of the students of UiTM Sarawak, Mukah Campus for the Semester December 2010 – April 2011. The instruments comprise the database on the students’ grade points for all the course codes offered in the campus, the teaching portfolio evaluation form and the student online feedback which was generated from i-Learn system. In this study, the teaching portfolio evaluation form is used to measure the teaching quality of the lecturer in delivering the respective course code. The database on the students’ grade points provide the information regarding the students’ grade points on all the course codes offered. The student online feedback provides the information regarding the students’ feedback on the academician that teaches them. The finding showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the strength of the correlation between the students’ online feedback and the students’ performance on the course codes offered (Sig. = 0.003). There was a significant positive correlation between the two variables (r = 0.223, p<0.01). However, there is no correlation found between the teaching quality of the academician and the students’ performance on the respective course code (p>0.05). This study concludes with the discussions on the findings and some recommendation for future study.