2007 Oxford Business & Economics Conference
ISBN : 978-0-9742114-7-3
Quality of Teaching Surveys and the Course Evaluation Questionnaire; How
do subject surveys relate to course results in Australian Universities
M. Davies, J. Hirschberg, J. Lye, C. Johnston
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
November 06
Abstract:
All tertiary institutions in Australia use the same Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ)
however for the internal evaluation of teaching with in subjects they use their own surveys.
This paper is the first attempt to perform an analysis of the internal Quality of Teaching
Surveys (QTS) used in all Australian Universities by investigating how they compare; across
Universities, to the CEQ and to other characteristics of the Universities. We categorize the
questions on each survey into one of 18 different possible types and use this classification of
the questions to define a measure of the similarity of these surveys to each other and to the
CEQ. By the use of an agglomerative cluster analysis and other content based methods we
then establish groupings of these institutions on the basis of the similarity of their
questionnaires. In addition, we determine if the other characteristics of the universities
influence the types of questions asked on each institution’s survey using a regression analysis
as well as determine to what extent the university wide teaching measures are influenced by
the nature of the teaching surveys used in each institution.
Key words: Subject Evaluation, Course Evaluation Questionnaire, Cluster Analysis
June 24-26, 2007
Oxford University, UK
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