Student profiles and their role in the evaluation of learning and teaching

Abstract

The concept of a teacher profile, determined from student evaluations of his or her teaching, is well established in the literature. A complementary concept, that of the student profile, has not been investigated to the same extent, and this may be partly due to the lack of identifiable evaluation returns from the students from most surveys of learning and teaching. In the current study several cohorts of students who undertook evaluations of teaching had the opportunity to include their Student ID on the survey form. This meant that it was possible to investigate returns from individual students to more than one course and teacher, and to see if there was any characteristic pattern in the evaluation. The results show that while not strong, there was evidence of students having a characteristic profile that affected the way they filled out the survey forms in each of their classes. Although the effect was statistically significant for both classes surveyed in the study, the correlation was stronger for the higher year level students. The results are important as they show that the teacher profiles are partly due to the student profiles, and this should be recognised by those reacting to student feedback.