Beyond satisfaction scores: visualising student comments for whole-of-course evaluation

This study examines the utility of a new method of analysing and reporting qualitative student survey comments. Visualisations of the sentiment of and key themes from qualitative student survey comments were developed for 34 subjects from two undergraduate health sciences courses undergoing transfor...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inAssessment and evaluation in higher education Vol. 46; no. 5; pp. 685 - 700
Main Authors Cunningham-Nelson, Samuel, Laundon, Melinda, Cathcart, Abby
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 19.07.2021
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
College students
Course Evaluation
Feedback (Response)
Focus groups
Health Sciences
Higher education
Interviews
Natural language processing
Polls & surveys
Qualitative research
Reliability
Semi Structured Interviews
sentiment analysis
Student Evaluation
Student Evaluation of Teacher Performance
student evaluation of teaching
Student Satisfaction
Student Surveys
Teacher evaluations
text analysis
Undergraduate Students
Validity
visualisation
Visualization
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:This study examines the utility of a new method of analysing and reporting qualitative student survey comments. Visualisations of the sentiment of and key themes from qualitative student survey comments were developed for 34 subjects from two undergraduate health sciences courses undergoing transformation. The course and subject visualisation reports were provided to academics who were members of the two course transformation teams. Utilising focus groups and semi-structured interview methodology, we examined academic perspectives on the potential usefulness of this new method of analysing and reporting qualitative comments from student evaluations of teaching (SET). Results indicate that visualisations are considered useful for focussing educators' attention on themes in qualitative comments rather than on individual negative comments. However, educators did not support use of the visualisations at this stage, citing concerns about the accuracy of sentiment analysis and the validity of SET surveys. There were many opportunities identified through the focus groups for future improvements to a visualisation technique for reporting student survey results.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:0260-2938
1469-297X
DOI:10.1080/02602938.2020.1805409