University performance evaluations: what are we really measuring?

By R. Bedggood, Jerome Donovan. 2012

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Surveying students to garner feedback on teaching and subject quality is a common occurrence in many universities globally. Despite the criticisms surrounding whether measures associated with these surveys are indeed valid, university managers continue to utilise them in key decision making. These surveys mirror business practices where measuring customer satisfaction via surveys is common. However, some argue that universities are misdirected in measuring satisfaction as a proxy for teaching quality, possibly subverting the potentially conflicting objective of student learning. Even so, both student satisfaction and student learning can be relevant performance measures. Accordingly, we have developed two robust measures of these constructs. We argue that student learning can be measured and used to provide formative feedback for improving teaching effectiveness. Alternatively, student satisfaction can be appropriate for determining whether students are ‘enjoying’ their studies, and likewise offers distinct benefits to university managers measuring performance outcomes.

Subfields: Accounting, Education, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbff631be7abce21d64fd0486d3b5c58680d88ac

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Bertha Joseph Ngereja
2. B. Andersen
3. Bassam Hussein
4. Simon Cadez

In Education

1. Bertha Joseph Ngereja
2. B. Andersen
3. Bassam Hussein
4. Rosemary L. Fisher
5. Áron Perényi
6. N. Birdthistle

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Bertha Joseph Ngereja
2. B. Andersen
3. Vlado Dimovski
4. Bassam Hussein

Citations in the corpus

• Research, teaching and performance evaluation in academia: the salience of quality (2017, background): “Article counts do not necessarily reflect the final aim of research activity, that is, knowledge production (Butler 2002); student evaluations do not necessarily reflect the final aim of teaching, that is, student learning (Bedggood and Donovan 2012).”
• Does Project-Based Learning (PBL) Promote Student Learning? A Performance Evaluation (2020, methodology): “Bedggood and Donovan [2] found that task difficulty could be used both as a learning measure and as a satisfaction measure.”
• The positive relationship between flipped and blended learning and student engagement, performance and satisfaction (2018, background): “Satisfaction is generally understood to be the extent to which students have enjoyed their studies (Bedggood and Donovan, 2012), and is the product of factors including engagement and skills development.”