Abstract:

Student knowledge assessment has become a primary for most universities (Osler & Mansaray, 2014), due to the strategic role of student learning outcomes (SLO) in Higher Education (HE) setting. Indeed, SLO is a critical indicator of the teachers’ quality and of the ability of faculty members to provide students with a competitive advantage in the labor market. As a matter of fact, SLO assessment is a complex issue mainly due to the high number of involved actors. SLO assessment should be embedded in the teaching and learning processes as a cultural attitude of educational institution. However, for it to be embedded in institutional processes, the commitment of the leadership and faculty is mandatory; the vision must become a mission by means of collaborative job and an ongoing sharing of information (McMillan et al., 2020). Moreover, some studies have highlighted how the effect of gender and race may affect the SLO in some disciplines (Ro & Loya, 2015) and more in general, how the students’ perception of their LO is affected by the effect of intersectional factors, such as gender identity, ethnic, religion, or digital attitude. With respect to the latter, we believe that the pandemic, accelerating the changeset in HE, has made SLO assessment a harder issue to be tackled, since it has amplified the digital divide within and across Countries. As result, may the Country of the University or the type of university program degree (online vs traditional) be considered as the same strength of an intersectional factor to be accounted for in the assessment of students’ perception? Starting from the paper of Botte et al. (2022) developing a specific scale for students’ perception of their LO, the aim of this paper is two-folds: firstly, we check if the robustness of the questionnaire holds in other data sample; then, we use collected data to verify the effect of intersectional factors on the model by using multivariate statistical approaches such as structural equation models (SEMs). The work attempts in checking invariance in SLO perception for different groups of students. Research was carried out in the framework of the Empower Competences for Onlife Learning in HE (ECOLHE) project, co-funded by the ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Union.

References:
[1] Botte, B., Marinensi, G., & Musella, F. (2022). Higher Education students’ perception of their learning outcomes: validation of a measurement scale. INTED2022 Proceedings. https://library.iated.org/view/BOTTE2022HIG
[2] McMillan, L., Johnson, T., Parker, F. M., Hunt, C. W., & Boyd, D. E. (2020). Improving Student Learning Outcomes through a Collaborative Higher Education Partnership. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 32(1), 117–124.
[3] Osler, J. E., & Mansaray, M. (2014). A Model for Determining Teaching Efficacy through the Use of Qualitative Single Subject Design, Student Learning Outcomes and Associative Statistics. Journal on School Educational Technology, 10(1), 22–35.
[4] Ro, H. K., & Loya, K. I. (2015). The effect of gender and race intersectionality on student learning outcomes in engineering. The Review of Higher Education, 38(3), 359–396.

Keywords:

Advanced multivariate statistical models, intersectional factors, higher education, perceived students' performance.