Instruments for obtaining student feedback: a review of the literature

Abstract

This paper reviews the research evidence concerning the use of formal instruments to measure students’ evaluations of their teachers, students’ satisfaction with their programmes and students’ perceptions of the quality of their programmes. These questionnaires can provide important evidence for assessing the quality of teaching, for supporting attempts to improve the quality of teaching and for informing prospective students about the quality of course units and programmes. The paper concludes by discussing several issues affecting the practical utility of the instruments that can be used to obtain student feedback. Many students and teachers believe that student feedback is useful and informative, but for a number of reasons many teachers and institutions do not take student feedback sufficiently seriously.

Acknowledgements

This is a revised version of an article that was originally published in Collecting and using student feedback on quality and standards of learning and teaching in HE, available on the Internet at www.hefce.ac.uk under ‘Publications/R&D reports’. It is reproduced here with permission from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. I am very grateful to John Brennan, Robin Brighton, Graham Gibbs, Herbert Marsh, Keith Trigwell, Ruth Williams and two anonymous reviewers for their various comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Hamish Coates for providing data from the study reported by McInnis et al. (2001).