Does the Use of Student Feedback Questionnaires Improve the Overall Quality of Teaching?

By David Kember, D. Leung, K. Kwan. 2002

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An investigation was conducted into 3- or 4-year departmental sets of student feedback questionnaire data from one university. Only four out of 25 departments had significant changes to any of the six dimensions in the 3- or 4-year period, and three of these significant changes were falls. There is, therefore, no evidence that the use of the questionnaire was making any contribution to improving the overall quality of teaching and learning of the departments, at least as perceived by the students. If it was, there should have been evidence of rising values. The following reasons why the use of the questionnaire might not have been conducive to improving teaching quality are discussed. The possibility that teaching quality is inherently stable is rejected. It is possible that feedback from the questionnaire was not used effectively. Related to this is whether instructors perceived that the university rewarded good teaching, so felt there was an incentive to make use of the feedback. The emphasis of the system was on appraisal, which might negate any developmental effect. The standard questionnaire and the associated procedures may have lacked flexibility and been inappropriate for innovative forms of teaching. The study questions whether student feedback questionnaires are utilising resources effectively if they are administered in an environment similar to the university in question, which appears reasonably typical.

Subfields: Education

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Citations in the corpus

Improving higher education practice through student evaluation systems: is the student voice being heard? (2014, background): “This study cannot tell us whether the lecturers chose to ignore the students’ calls for more experiential learning and active engagement in the classroom or if lecturers were simply not able to act upon these calls (Kember, Leung, and Kwan 2002; Zhao and Gallant 2012).”
Doing course evaluation as if learning matters most (2008, background): “The same dichotomy also has been referred to as accountability and improvement (Bowden & Marton, 1998), appraisal and developmental purpose (Kember et al., 2002), judgemental and developmental purpose (Hounsell, 2003), or quality assurance and quality enhancement (Biggs, 2003).”
Student evaluation of teaching quality in higher education: development of an instrument based on 10 Likert‐scales (2007, background): “However, Kember et al. (2002) found no evidence for the hypothesis that the use of their Student Feedback Questionnaire improved teaching performance, at least as perceived by the students.”
On the Validity of Student Evaluation of Teaching (2013, background): “Kember and Wong (2000), for instance, concluded from interviews with 55 Hong Kong undergraduate students that students’ perceptions of teaching quality should be seen as the result of an interplay between students’ conceptions of learning (a continuum between active and passive learning) and student”
Instruments for obtaining student feedback: a review of the literature (2005, background): “Conversely, course designers who adopt more student-focused models of teaching may find that these instruments are unhelpful as evaluative tools (Kember et al., 2002).”
Promoting student-centred forms of learning across an entire university (2009, background): “Kember et al. (2002) conducted an investigation which examined departmental sets of student feedback questionnaire data from one university over a 3 or 4 year period.”