The development, validation and application of the Course Experience Questionnaire

Abstract

The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is a development of work originally carried out at Lancaster University in the 1980s. It is used as a measure of perceived teaching quality in degree programmes in national annual surveys of all graduates in the Australian higher education system and is increasingly being employed as a measure of the quality of teaching in universities in the UK. This article discusses the development and use of the CEQ and the construction of a new generic skills scale. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of large multidisciplinary samples of students and graduates from several universities established the reliability and validity of both the full and short forms of the instrument, and identified a two-factor higher order structure. The criterion validity of the instrument was also established, with scores on the CEQ demonstrating positive correlations with students' approaches to learning, perceived course satisfaction, academic achievement and reported generic (‘enterprise˚s) skills development. The instrument also demonstrated discriminant validity via its capacity to differentiate between pedagogically distinct programmes. These results confirm the validity and usefulness of the CEQ as a performance indicator of university teaching quality.