Applying statistical process control to teaching quality assurance at higher education institutions

Abstract

Although student evaluation of teaching is an important part of teaching quality assurance at higher education institutions, no absolute standards exist for assessing each course’s teaching evaluation rating after teaching evaluation. In this paper, we develop a novel method of using average and standard deviation charts ($\overline{X}-S$ charts), which are based on the theory of statistical process control, to properly assess every course’s teaching evaluation rating. Through an application of teaching performance assessment at a management school, this research demonstrates a useful contribution to enhancing the practice of teaching and teaching performance assessment: Using $\overline{X}-S$ charts’ three-sigma limits (which are established based on a school’s historical teaching evaluation data) as robust performance assessment standards, this method can provide a reliable assessment result on every course’s teaching evaluation rating; such assessment is useful for helping teachers and administrators reliably identify the low-performance courses in each semester for making timely improvements.

Keywords:

• Control chart
• higher education
• statistical process control
• teaching performance assessment
• teaching quality assurance

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry H. Bi

Henry H. Bi obtained his Ph.D. from the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona in 2004. He is Associate Professor at Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. He is a Senior Member of ASQ and a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt. His research interests include quality management and performance benchmarking on the levels of countries, organizations, and individuals. He has published papers on quality management and performance benchmarking in journals such as Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Benchmarking: An International Journal, Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods, Journal of Public Affairs, and Studies in Higher Education.