Course recommendation as a construct in student evaluations: will students recommend your course?

ABSTRACT

Recommendation is a highly credible and powerful construct in marketing. This article investigates the construct intention to recommend in the context of student evaluations of teaching. Motivated by changes in the sector, the study explores what factors drive course recommendation and their relationship with each other. A structural model is tested, using partial least squares on a sample of 113 students. The results show that both emotional (i.e. joy of learning) and cognitive (i.e. course value) factors influence intention to recommend. These two driving factors are more likely to occur if the course can bridge theory and real-world practice. The approach to understanding what drives course recommendation opens up new avenues of research. It proposes to expand the traditional model of student evaluations of teaching to one which includes course value in the context of a competitive education sector.

KEYWORDS:

• competitive market
• higher education
• recommendation
• teaching evaluation
• course value

Subject Classification Codes:

• 130303
• 130304

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Yvonne Breyer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3936-5050

Notes

1. Benton and Cashin (2011) observe that ‘student ratings’ might be the preferable expression as ‘using the term “rating” rather than “evaluation” helps to distinguish between the people who provide the information … and those who interpret it’. While the authors are in broad agreement with the statement, the term SETs is well-established in the literature and will be used in the present paper.

2. Measured by the sum of standard deviations of all variables <0.5. If the standard deviation values are less than 0.5 (i.e. very closer to zero), this means participants tend to give the same answer throughout.