Rethinking module evaluation: defining, measuring and promoting engagement with teaching excellence by enabling the unfettered student voice.

Higher education exists to support learning, for the benefit of individuals, communities and wider global society. We can evaluate learning through assessment, measuring change in knowledge acquisition, skills application and understanding. It is essential that academics also evaluate the effectiveness of what they do in the classroom to support student learning. This helps to ensure that the quality of teaching is the best that it can be, providing evidence of what is working, which can be continued and shared as best practice, as well as evidence to inform enhancement, at the individual level, where needed.

As such, evaluation of teaching is commonplace in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Asking students to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching that they have received in supporting their learning, via Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) questionnaires, has emerged as the most common tool for assessing teaching.

However, SET suffers from a reputational problem. The majority of the research literature condemns SETs as unreliable, invalid, ineffective tools in the University teacher’s toolbox, potentially diminishing academic standards and contributing to academics’ disengagement from student feedback and institutional policy.

However, there is great value in hearing the student voice.
Given the improvement potential offered by the student voice, it is essential to design a way of capturing the student voice that realises the benefits of student participation in the design and delivery of their learning and teaching, whilst avoiding the key concerns outlined above.

This paper reports the findings from a study that aimed to achieve this.

The impetus for the study was the need to resolve a policy deadlock at a UK University, which had emerged over a number of years. This study sought to understand and address the reasons for this impasse, to enable the development of a student evaluation of teaching at the module level that addresses the reputational problems associated with SETs and encourages a partnership approach to learning and teaching. This paper gives the results of this study, presenting a module evaluation questionnaire (MEQ) that successfully resolved this deadlock, increasing academic and student belief in the value of SET and the ability of student evaluation to contribute positively to learning and teaching enhancement.