On the Use of Student Evaluation of Teaching: A Longitudinal Analysis Combining Measurement Issues and Implications of the Exercise

Isabella Sulis (), Mariano Porcu and Vincenza Capursi
Additional contact information
Isabella Sulis: Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali e delle Istituzioni
Mariano Porcu: Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali e delle Istituzioni
Vincenza Capursi: Aziendali e Statistiche

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2019, vol. 142, issue 3, No 19, 1305-1331

Abstract: Abstract Multi item questionnaires are widely used to collect students’ evaluation of teaching at university. This article makes an attempt to analyse students’ evaluation on a broad perspective. Its main aim is to adjust the evaluations from a wide range of factors which jointly may influence the teaching process: academic year peculiarities, course characteristics, students’ characteristics and item dimensionality. By setting the analysis in a generalised mixed models framework a large flexibility is introduced in the measurement of the quality of university teaching in students’ perception. In that way we consider (1) the effects of potential confounding factors which are external to the process under evaluation; (2) the dependency structure across units in the same clusters; (3) the assessment of real improvement in lecturers’ performance over time and (4) the uncertainty related to the use of an overall indicator to assess the global level of quality of the teaching as it has been assessed by the students. The implications related to a misuse of the evaluation results in implementing university policies are discussed comparing point versus interval estimates and adjusted versus unadjusted indicators.

Keywords: Measurement models; Adjusted indicators; Multilevel models; Teaching evaluation; Mokken analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-018-1946-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:soinre:v:142:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s11205-018-1946-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-018-1946-8

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().