Let's ask our students what really matters to them

Abstract

PurposeStudents' feedback is of great importance to the development of knowledge about teaching in higher education. One of the main purposes for which this feedback is collected is teaching quality assessment, usually conducted through course and teacher evaluations completed at the end of the course. However, for improving students' perceptions of teaching quality, their prior expectations should be identified first and the aspects that they consider relevant for a “good teaching” should be found out. Moreover, obtaining feedback at the end of a course could not benefit the respondents themselves. This work analyses students' opinions about the importance of several aspects related to the quality of teaching in an undergraduate course.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire was administered to gather students' opinions about the importance of several aspects related to the quality of teaching in an undergraduate course. Differences in the mean score of each aspect depending on students' characteristics were also analyzed.FindingsThe teaching characteristics that students considered more important were lecturer enthusiasm, the organization of the lectures and materials, the examination methods and feedbacks, the interest and intellectual challenge of the course and the friendliness, interest and accessibility of the lecturer. Differences in the importance of the different aspects exist depending on gender, expected grade and prior interest in the subject.Originality/valueResults could help lecturers to do a better programming of the different features of the course and prepare the subject more effectively, which is likely to positively impact student satisfaction; student satisfaction, in turn, has been related to an improvement in students' performance.