Exploring the use of best-worst scaling to elicit course experience questionnaire responses

Abstract

Students are an important stakeholder group in the context of quality assurance in higher education. From their perspective as learners, students’ views on educational experiences are increasingly used as an indicator of educational quality. The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is a widely used quantitative tool to gauge students’ perceptions of degree programmes. With a view to enhancing the scope for differentiation between individual questionnaire items, this paper explores the use of best–worst scaling to elicit CEQ responses as an alternative to a ratings instrument. The data for this study were generated from a representative sample (n = 263) of graduates from a Dutch university. The survey focused on two core CEQ scales: Good Teaching and Generic Skills. The results show that the Generic Skills items were deemed more pertinent to the degree programme than were the ones related to Good Teaching, with problem-solving skills perceived as the most relevant aspect. Using latent class analysis, six groups of graduates were identified that differed mainly in terms of the relative importance of the skills attributes. Overall, this study shows how the features of best–worst scaling can be used to enhance the scope for discrimination between items in a degree programme evaluation.

Keywords:

• Student experience
• student evaluation
• Course Experience Questionnaire
• best–worst scaling
• latent class analysis

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges Leann Poeth and Paul Jacobs of Maastricht University for facilitating and administering the survey data collection, and he thanks the graduates for taking part in the study. The author is grateful to three anonymous referees for their time and effort in providing comments.

Notes on contributor

Twan Huybers is an associate professor in the School of Business, UNSW – Canberra, Australia. His research interests include the application of choice experiments to a range of decision-making contexts. In recent years, he has focused his research on the use of choice experiments as a novel way to investigate student evaluation in higher education.