| This page contains links to summaries
of the student evaluation of courses, lecturing (using a 'large
group teaching' form) and tutoring/demonstrating ('small group teaching'
form). Tables are divided according to the form type used: course
(C), lecturing (A), and tutoring (B). The data within the tables are aggregated by College, level (first/later year or honours/postgraduate) and class size. Explanations of the statistics for readers without a statistical background are below.
The data has been sub-divided by College, course size and level as these are factors known to be associated with different patterns and absolute levels of student ratings. To keep the data
up to date, only data from the last three years has been included
in the 'current' dataset, older data is available in an archive from 1995 onwards. |
More detail on the data
Surveys with less than 5 respondents were excluded from these tables.
In addition, to increase the reliability of the figures, more than
4 surveys were necessary in any single category for the figures
to be presented. Note that the means are aggregated by courses rather
than by students. An implication of this is that courses with small
enrolments and those with large enrolments contribute equally to
the calculations. In addition, the data was screened using a variety
of processes to increase its reliability and validity; for example,
duplicate surveys were searched for and eliminated.
More detail on the forms
The major research streams that the ANUSET system is based on are
the SEEQ (Marsh & Dunkin, 1992) and CEQ (Ramsden, 1991). These
both have extensive theoretical and empirical underpinnings spanning
at least two decades. In addition to the research literature and
interest group input, the form development process has included
the following: the forms were redesigned in light of student comments,
response patterns were analysed to detect redundant items, there
was input from professional form designers, teaching staff gave
feedback on draft forms, and the forms were piloted on groups of
ANU students.
References
Marsh, H. W., and Dunkin, M. J. (1992). Students' Evaluations of
University Teaching: A Multidimensional Perspective. Higher Education:
Handbook of Theory and Research. J. C. Smart. New York, Agathon.
VIII: 143 - 233.
Ramsden, P. 1991, A performance indicator of teaching quality in
higher education: the Course Experience Questionnaire, Studies in
Higher Education, 16:129. |
Explanations of the statistics
In simple terms, the data summarises the means (averages) of students’ ratings of courses. It also reports a measure of the variability between courses. This is the standard deviation of the course means. A larger standard deviation indicates more variability between courses.
The standard deviation, is sometimes confused with the standard error, which is an indicator of the degree of reliability of the estimate of the mean. Standard error, (S.E.), is a function of the variation between surveys, and the number of surveys included in the analysis. (S.E. = (Std. Deviation)/ √n). Two standard errors form approximately a 95% confidence interval around the mean. That is, we can be approximately 95% confident that the mean falls within two standard errors of the observed mean.
E.g., for the ANU undergraduate courses included in this data set, we can approximately 95% confident that the mean course rating for ‘overall impact’ is within .03 of 5.4.
Means are calculated in the usual way. They are, more precisely, arithmetic means, i.e. within each category they are calculated by adding up all the ratings for each question and dividing by the number of ratings.
The ‘unit of analysis’ of these tables is the average rating of courses, not the average student. An implication of this is that students’ ratings of small courses have contributed to the final figures as much as students ratings of a large courses.
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