Ensuring improvement or improving assurance: student feedback-based evaluation in Australian higher education

Abstract

Student feedback-based evaluation of teaching, courses and programs is a familiar feature of the contemporary Australian higher education landscape. Over the last three decades, it has moved from a largely peripheral and experimental presence to a significant institutional position, moving rapidly from the status of an academic development fringe dweller to a privileged institutional citizen. It is now a powerful proxy for assuring the quality of teaching, courses and programs across diverse discipline and qualification frameworks. The data it generates increasingly guides significant judgments about academic appointment, performance and promotion. Its outcomes also inform the student marketplace around institutional and program quality, and will potentially shape performance funding of Australian universities. This significant evolution and its implications for academic teaching is therefore a legitimate matter of scholarly interest. Yet, although there is evidence of considerable research interest in the quantitative instruments of student feedback and the effective use of their outcomes, research around its contemporary function is much more limited. This thesis attempts to address this gap, by exploring the forces that have shaped the progressive emergence student feedback-based evaluation in Australian higher education and the influence it exerts on contemporary approaches to academic teaching. The research uses the explanatory potential of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) with the objective of generating a critical understanding of the development, function and potential of student feedback-based evaluation. This analysis is developed through a series of interpretive lenses. The thesis firstly analyses the historicity of student feedback-based evaluation - both at a general level and in its specific evolution in Australian higher education. This encounters the forces that have shaped its design and use, as well as the tensions that have been fundamental to this evolved form and function. Secondly, by analysing the current institutional framing of student feedback-based evaluation, the thesis considers the complex demands that shape its contemporary state. This adopts a particular focus on the increasingly ambiguous relationship of student feedback with pedagogical and academic development that results from elevating tensions between various drives for quality improvement, quality assurance, performance management and institutional marketing. Thirdly, qualitative case studies involving two cohorts of postgraduate teachers at an Australian university are considered. These case studies are framed by the use of a novel CHAT-informed, action research model. The situated cases provide an insight into the current state and the developmental potential of student feedback-based evaluation in an Australian higher education setting. These outcomes are analysed to further understand the increasingly complex relationship between student feedback- based evaluation and institutional demands, professional discourses and pedagogical change. It also provides a means of considering the broader developmental potential that arises from collective forms of academic engagement derived from the elevated use of qualitative forms of student feedback. Based on this analysis, tentative conclusions are drawn about the affordances and constraints of orthodox quantitative student evaluation. In addition, the potential of more complex engagement with the student voice is considered, to assess its ability to incite substantial pedagogical and academic development in higher education environments.