Student Perception of Course and Teacher Quality: A Comprehensive Cluster Analysis

Faruk Guder, Mary Malliaris and Arup Varma

Management and Labour Studies, 2026, vol. 51, issue 2, 173-189

Abstract: End-of-term course evaluations often use multiple-choice questions asking students to evaluate their experience with the class. Students are also asked to give an overall score to the instructor and to the course. To help instructors interpret the scores and work to improve their evaluations, we looked at 16 descriptive statements in 2,048 evaluations of course sections over a span of 4 years. Cluster analyses revealed that the course score related the most to Cluster 2 statements (feedback and challenge) and the instructor score to Cluster 4 statements (clear and stimulating presentations). We then analysed these specific clusters in more detail to provide specific recommendations to faculty on how to improve their student evaluation of teaching scores using this output. Overall, our study revealed several critical benefits of student evaluations of teaching effectiveness. Key findings include: (a) clear and informative teaching helps decrease student stress; (b) encouraging students to set and achieve challenging goals promotes personal and academic growth, and the fact that (c) students want to feel challenged, so they can grow. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer suggestions for future research.

Keywords: Course evaluations; clustering; teaching effectiveness; faculty performance; improving performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0258042X261442004 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:manlab:v:51:y:2026:i:2:p:173-189

DOI: 10.1177/0258042X261442004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management and Labour Studies from XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business Management & Human Resources
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().