The Evaluation of the Course Description Quality by Students of the Psychology Teaching Training Programme

Abstract

In our contribution we focus on the problem of the quality increase of university education and its evaluation by students in the last year of university study. The quality increase is an actual challenge which is analysed and practically implemented through various concepts, like KSC (knowledge, skills, competences) Typology (Wintertog, Delamare-Le Deist, & Stringfellow, 2006), Tuning Methodology (Gonzáles, & Wagenaar, 2008), Biggs’ SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs, & Tang, 2007) or Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive education goals (Bloom et al., 1956; Krathwohl, 2002). Our attention is dominantly set onto these concepts, as well as on the practical outcomes which are the products of the projects solved at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra (Verešová, Žilová, & Vozár, 2012; Verešová, & Čerešník, 2013). The research problem was determined as the evaluation of the explicitness and the understandability of the changes in course descriptions of the study program subjects by the students of the Psychology teacher training program. The research sample consisted of students in the last year of the Psychology teacher training program (N=22). We assumed that innovated course descriptions will be evaluated positively from the point of view of better explicitness and understandability. The research method was the original questionnaire created by M. Verešová, & Ľ. Pilárik (2013). It was targeted on the evaluation of nine parameters of the course descriptions through a five point scale where the end points expressed clear agreement and disagreement respectively, with formulated items. Statistical analysis was realised by Mann-Whitney test in SPSS 20.0 software. We accepted the standard level of statistical significance α≤0.05. The acquired results allow us to support the formulated hypotheses. The results show that the innovation of the course descriptions was a progressive change which can be considered as a positive alteration of the quality increase system in education. They also show that there exists a need for a higher application of the acquired knowledge and the particularity and diversification of the methods of education, self-education and evaluation.