Developing an Instrument for Assessment of Academic Management in Engineering Courses

Abstract

Higher education in Brazil been expanding in recent years, although, one of the major problems encountered have been the evasion and failure rates in general courses and specifically in engineering undergraduate courses. In this context, educational evaluation, with the goal of diagnosing needs for improvement, can contribute to the quality of higher education, regarding some aspects such as teaching methodology, human interrelationships in the teaching profession and academic management, among others. This study is based on the analysis of the development and subsequent implementation of an assessment tool that would enable the analysis of academic and administrative expertise of academic management. The instrument consists of a list of 15 statements related to aspects of higher education management, where the target audience of the research are the teachers of 6 engineering courses at Federal University of Ceara (UFC), indicating their degree of agreement with the statements. For the analysis, a multivariate statistical tool called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used. The results show the feasibility of PCA to analyze aspects of academic management, by explaining relevant information extracted from the latent variables of the data, which allowed us to identify a group of clusters related to management of higher education in engineering within the UFC. The study points to the use of this information in the future related to the contents of external assessments through more robust and detailed mathematical analysis tools.