Validating the Course Experience Questionnaire in West Bengal higher secondary education

Abstract

The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is a 36-item instrument that is intended to measure six different aspects of students’ perceptions of the academic quality of their programmes. It has been widely used in Western countries, and it has also been used in non-Western countries, including China, Hong Kong, Japan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, in the latter countries, it has sometimes not been possible to identify the full range of constructs that were supposed to be measured by the original CEQ. We translated the CEQ into Bengali and administered this to 552 science students at 15 higher secondary schools in West Bengal, India. A confirmatory factor analysis found that their responses provided a poor fit to the original six-factor model of the CEQ. An exploratory factor analysis identified just four constructs, which reflected good teaching, generic skills, student support and appropriate workload. The items with salient loadings on the four factors were used to construct four scales. The students’ scores on three of the four scales showed satisfactory levels of internal consistency. A factor analysis of their scores on all four scales yielded one overarching factor that could be interpreted as a measure of perceived academic quality. A reduced version of the CEQ consisting of the 30 items that constitute these four scales can be recommended as a measure of students’ perceptions of the academic quality of programmes in West Bengal.