Students' Evaluations of Tertiary Instruction: Testing the Applicability of American Surveys in an Australian Setting

Abstract

Two student evaluation surveys developed in the United States were administered to a sample of Australian university students. Students were asked to evaluate one of the best and one of the worst lecturers in their university experience, to indicate inappropriate items, and to select the most important items. Each of the 63 items was seen as appropriate by most students, each item was chosen by at least a few students as being most important, and all items — except those related to Workload/Difficulty — differentiated between best and worst lecturers. Separate factor analyses of the two surveys revealed the same factors that had been identified in American settings. Furthermore there was good agreement between the factors from the two surveys that were hypothesized to measure the same components of effective teaching. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of evaluating effective teaching in Australian universities and the appropriateness of two American surveys to an Australian setting.