Focus Group meets Nominal Group Technique: an effective combination for student evaluation?

Abstract

In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers’ practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, ‘Nominal Focus Group’, which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams.

Keywords:

• Focus Group
• Nominal Group Technique
• Nominal Focus Group
• curriculum development
• curriculum enhancement
• evaluation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all those students who took part in the sessions and also thanks to Susanne Voelkel, Andy Bates, Peter Kahn and Trish Lunt, University of Liverpool, for their involvement and feedback in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.