Student Evaluation of Teaching: A Study Exploring Student Rating Instrument Free-form Text Comments
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Student Evaluation of Teaching: A Study Exploring Student Rating Instrument Free-form Text Comments Ieva Stupans 1 & Therese McGuren 1 & Anna Marie Babey 1
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Student rating instruments are recognised to be valid indicators of effective instruction, providing a valuable tool to improve teaching. However, free-form text comments obtained from the open-ended question component of such surveys are only infrequently analysed comprehensively. We employed an innovative, systematic approach to the analysis of text-based feedback relating to student perceptions of and experiences with a recently developed university program. The automated nature of the semantic analysis tool Leximancer enabled a critical interrogation across units of study, mining the cumulative text for common themes and recurring core concepts. The results of this analysis facilitated the identification of issues that were not apparent from the purely quantitative data, thus providing a deeper understanding of the curriculum and teaching effectiveness that was constructive and detailed. Keywords blended learning . data mining . student rating instrument . student survey
Ieva Stupans received a Bachelor of Pharmacy (honours) and a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia. She is Professor of Pharmacy at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, and her special interests include assessment. Therese McGuren is a practicing pharmacist who received her Bachelor of Pharmacy from the University of Sydney. She is a Lecturer in Applied Pharmacotherapeutics and has a special interest in interprofessional collaboration in both undergraduate and workplace settings Anna Marie Babey has a Ph.D. from McGill University in Canada. She has taught pharmacology, pathophysiology, physiology and neuroscience across degree programs in pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, nursing, veterinary medicine and physiotherapy, leading to a developing interest in accessibility of foundation science content. Her scientific work focuses on the cellular adaptation to opioids and caffeine.
* Ieva Stupans [email protected] 1
School of Science and Technology, University of New England, Armidale 2350, Australia
Innov High Educ
There is an extensive and complex literature addressing the widespread use of student survey rating instruments as a measure of teaching performance in higher education throughout the world (Zabaleta, 2007). Although concern has been raised that student ratings instruments represent a disruptive influence on learning (Eiszler, 2002), the majority opinion supports their value as a reliable, valid, and defensible indicator of effective instruction that can be employed to improve and optimise performance of academic staff 1(Cashin, 1995; Marsh & Roche, 1997; Denson, Loveday, & Dalton, 2010; Spooren, Brockx, & Mortelmans, 2013). Student rating instruments most frequently consist of a combination of Likert scale responses to statistically valid questions and one or more open-ended questions (Denson, et al.,
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