A new approach to analyze the curriculum structure using the Students' Evaluation of Education Quality instrument

There is a considerable number of engineering courses that suffer with failure rates and high withdrawal of students in their first year, especially in fundamental discipline areas like mathematics and science. In order to detect the educational quality indicators, a study was conducted to validate the application of Students' Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) instrument in an engineering course, using Factor Analysis (FA). The choice of FA to validate the instrument is that this method has been used to validate the SEEQ instrument from the students' point of view but using this structure does not allowed us analyze the disciplines in focus, then we need to validate this same instrument into our research context according to a latent structure performed by the disciplines. We validate the application of the factor analysis by the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartletts' tests that investigate the sample adequacy. After the validation of the sample adequacy, the factor analysis validate the structure of the questionnaire, and we can state that the SEEQ instrument is valid for application in a teleinformatics engineering context to analyze the disciplines. As a final result of this procedure, we guarantee the consistency of the instrument for the application to analyze different disciplines under different criterions that can possibility a deeper analysis of the curriculum structure.

[1]  Herbert W. Marsh,et al.  The Influence of Student, Course, and Instructor Characteristics in Evaluations of University Teaching , 1980 .

[2]  Duane T. Wegener,et al.  Evaluating the use of exploratory factor analysis in psychological research. , 1999 .

[3]  T. E. V. Silva,et al.  Multivariate analysis for students' evaluation of teaching effectiveness in teleinformatics engineering , 2012, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE) 2012.

[4]  W. Sedlacek,et al.  Using Factor Analysis To Organize Student Services. , 2001 .

[5]  Xianggui Qu,et al.  Multivariate Data Analysis , 2007, Technometrics.

[6]  H. Marsh,et al.  Multidimensional Students' Evaluations of Teaching Effectiveness: A Profile Analysis. , 1993 .

[7]  John T. E. Richardson,et al.  Instruments for obtaining student feedback: a review of the literature , 2005 .

[8]  P. Spooren,et al.  Teacher professionalism and student evaluation of teaching: will better teachers receive higher ratings and will better students give higher ratings? , 2006 .

[9]  Herbert W. Marsh,et al.  Students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness: The stability of mean ratings of the same teachers over a 13-year period , 1991 .

[10]  H. Marsh,et al.  Making students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: The critical issues of validity, bias, and utility. , 1997 .

[11]  Rasmus Bro,et al.  Multi-way Analysis with Applications in the Chemical Sciences , 2004 .

[12]  R. MacCallum,et al.  THE APPLICATION OF EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS IN APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY: A CRITICAL REVIEW AND ANALYSIS , 1986 .

[13]  Herbert W. Marsh,et al.  The multidimensionality of students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness: The generality of factor structures across academic discipline, instructor level, and course level , 1991 .

[14]  F. Floyd,et al.  Factor analysis in the development and refinement of clinical assessment instruments. , 1995 .

[15]  San-Liang Lee,et al.  Student Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness of a Nationwide Innovative Education Program on Image Display Technology , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Education.

[16]  R. Gorsuch Exploratory factor analysis: its role in item analysis. , 1997, Journal of personality assessment.

[17]  Elizabeth Godfrey,et al.  An Investigation Into the Understanding and Skills of First-Year Electrical Engineering Students , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Education.

[18]  P. Abrami,et al.  Students' Evaluations of University Teaching: Research Findings, Methodological Issues, and Directions for Future Research , 1987 .

[19]  André Lima Férrer de Almeida,et al.  Multilinear decomposition application into students' evaluation of teaching effectiveness , 2013, 2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON).