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How to rate learning
Is it time to retire student experience surveys in universities?
By Jason Lodge
The great debate about the use of student experience surveys in higher education has again reared its ugly head. Merlin Crossley from UNSW recently pointed out, in a News Limited editorial, that although flawed, student experience surveys still provide the best indicator of teaching quality in higher education. While there is undoubtedly value in surveying students to determine their level of satisfaction, this argument misses the point when it comes to quality teaching.
THE TROUBLE WITH STUDENT EXPERIENCE Much of the focus of learning and teaching in higher education in the last decade has been on the student experience. Improving student experiences at university is undeniably a worthwhile cause. Students should absolutely expect to be satisfied with their experiences at university and feel supported by their teachers and the institution.
The reasons why students might be satisfied or dissatisfied, however, often have nothing to do with either the quality of their learning or the quality of the teaching. Asking students to self-report on their perceptions of their learning is fraught for well-known reasons and for some less well known.
As has been widely researched and reported, there are fundamental biases that influence the ways in which students respond to surveys about their learning experiences, no matter how targeted the questions. These biases tend to disadvantage teachers who are women, are less experienced or are perceived as less attractive.
What has received less attention is that students also tend to be poor at judging their own learning progress. There is a lot of evidence suggesting that students are relatively accurate at predicting how well they will perform on assessment. This accuracy does not translate to progress. Learning is about ongoing development, not just about a capacity to perform. Therefore, the inability of students to accurately judge how well they are progressing is a problem for them, for teachers and for leaders in higher education.
If teaching is aimed at helping students to learn, rather than just perform on an assessment task, there are serious questions to be asked about the capacity of student evaluations to assess teaching quality. Even if the instrument provides a sense of how well students think their experiences have prepared them for an exam, this does not mean they will be able to use the knowledge meaningfully in the future. It is just as likely that the instrument is evaluating how confident students are in their knowledge. Confidence may not correlate at all with how much they have actually developed as emerging professionals, scholars or scientists.
EXCELLENCE VS EXPERTISE IN TEACHING From the perspective of leaders and teachers, there is a clear issue with relying on student surveys to determine teaching quality. What is perhaps more troubling is that, even if the instrument does really assess how confident students are about their performance on an exam, this is a poor and potentially misleading indicator of teaching quality.
Research is increasingly demonstrating the
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