Student evaluations of course and teacher: factor analysis and SSA approaches

Abstract

The present study attempts to discover organizing principles in college students’ evaluations of their formal and informal educational programs. The study was conducted during the 1998–99 academic year. The data consisted of 14,344 assessment sheets completed by students at the Jordan Valley Regional College in Israel. Each assessment sheet contained 12 variables. Factor analysis revealed two main factors: the course (seven variables) and the teacher (five variables). A Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) revealed an additional distinction. Some of the evaluation items relate directly to the course or teacher and some relate to the interaction between the course or teacher and the students. Distinguishing between these categories could be helpful in identifying or correcting bias in student evaluations.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to The Jordan Valley Regional College for allowing me to use their data and to Allison Ofanansky for editing the manuscript. A preliminary version of the article was presented at the Fifth International Conference on Logic and Methodology, Cologne, October 2000. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.

Notes

* 38 Bethlehem Road, Jerusalem 93504, Israel. Email: [email protected]

Since its creation in the early 1980s, responses to the SEEQ have been collected from over 1 million undergraduate and graduate students in 50,000 courses. Though the SEEQ has been translated into a number of other languages, and a Chinese version was tested with positive results (Marsh et al. 1997), to the best of our knowledge, it has not yet been translated into Hebrew or used by universities in Israel.