In 1996 I was asked to moderate a symposium presented by people from Business/ Commerce/Law courses that had received positive responses from students on the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ). Most of the representatives were not sure why they received the positive responses that they did. There was enormous variation in the contexts they described. The contexts included distance learning, large undergraduate courses, small postgraduate courses, and disciplines included accounting, marketing, business administration, management, economics and law. At first sight there appeared to be little that the programs as described had in common, but what was apparent was that the program co-ordinators had a lot in common. They were all teachers who were concerned about students. They were student-focused.
The CEQ asks students to respond to five different aspects of a course and at the end to give an overall satisfaction rating of their course. The five areas are: good teaching, appropriate assessment, clear goals and standards, appropriate workload and generic skills. High scores on the items in the first four of these five scales are consistently shown to be related to high quality student learning. The items are also derived from ideas consistent with a student-focused approaches to teaching and they are part of a high-inference instrument, which means that the items are more inferential than literal.
The CEQ gives an indication of how a group of students experience aspects of their course, and indirectly, the approach they take to learning on that course. It is not an outcomes indicator. It cannot be used to determine which university produces the best graduates. It is more of a value-added measure. Because high CEQ scores relate to high quality approaches to learning, a university or course with a higher CEQ score is more likely to be offering those particular students a higher quality learning environment. That course is giving its students the better learning opportunities - it is adding more value. But this does not mean it will produce better graduates - that depends, in part, on the starting point of the students.
Because the CEQ measures how students experience a particular course, the most positive responses to the CEQ arise when the course delivers what the students' desire. This doesn't mean that students should just be given what they want, it means finding out what they expect at various stages throughout their program, and discussing those expectations with them, with the aim of changing both students' perceptions and the course to achieve a match. In the 10 Business/Commerce/Law presentations, this was a common theme. It meant that there was almost always close contact of some sort between student and teacher as perceived by the student, and it is also likely that this is perceived as personal attention, even in the larger classes. The sorts of comments made by the 10 presenters that were along these lines included:
In all the cases described above, the students felt they received some attention. While it was not all the same sort of attention (it was not all small class sizes, or dedicated staff) it matched those students needs. Strategies like those above will not be effective in other contexts if they do not match needs.
Conclusions which can be drawn from these observations are:
1. Best practice in university teaching may be achieved when students feel they have received their version of personal attention from the staff managing their learning program. This personal attention may come in a variety of forms depending on the context, and it may be more important to students than issues such as class size, computer access, teaching method and so on. This practice is likely to be derived from a general student-focused approach rather than through using strategies which are successful elsewhere or addressing responses to individual low-score items on the CEQ which, on a high-inference instrument is not likely to be effective.
2. It is quite possible for students to have different expectations of a course than the designers and teachers of that course. This may result in lower CEQ scores and can be addressed by discussing with students the expectations of the course, and their expectations. (Again this is the basis of a student-focused approach).
3. The four scales: good teaching, clear goals and standards, appropriate assessment and appropriate workload are derived from a research approach which found correlations between student perceptions of these variables, their approach to learning and the quality of their learning outcome. In considering changes in practice to improve CEQ scores, the key question to ask is: "Is the change likely to encourage students to adopt more of an approach in which they search for meaning, or will it discourage such an approach? (A student-focused teaching approach.) This relation is what is behind words such as appropriate in Appropriate Assessment. It is appropriate if it encourages meaningful learning. It is an appropriate workload if it allows students time to seek meaning.
4. UTS is currently making use of the qualitative feedback from past CEQ forms, and the SEQ from CLT. Both are valuable ways of finding out how students are perceiving their courses.
Keith Trigwell
August 1999
