Improving the quality of Higher Education teaching through the exploitation of student evaluations and the use of control charts

Abstract

Student evaluations of faculty members' teaching effectiveness are considered quite important in Higher Education (HE). In this paper, we elaborate on the framework of Nikolaidis and Dimitriadis, based mainly on Statistical Process Control techniques and tools, which enables a deeper analysis and broader exploitation of student evaluation data. More specifically, we thoroughly examine and evaluate through simulation, several popular types of control charts (CCs), identifying the most suitable among them, using as comparison criteria various statistical properties of CCs. The ultimate goal of our research is to provide decision makers in HE institutions with an easy-to-use reliable tool for not only monitoring the teaching process, but also identifying the effective and ineffective faculty members’ teaching performance to promote the quality of their Institution.