Student Feedback: The Cornerstone to an Effective Quality Assurance System in Higher Education

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Preface

Student feedback has been a contested area of higher education quality for over a decade. Initially, it was utilised primarily as a teaching performance management tool, which many lecturers have perceived as highly controversial. Gradually, feedback instruments started being recognised as tools which may enhance teaching and learning, rather than just a monitoring tool for underperforming or otherwise unpopular lecturers.

This book aims to highlight the developments and emerging trends in the student feedback domain. The book consists of nine chapters, highlighting not only the expansion in the use of student feedback in higher education, but also specific issues relating to university leadership in this area, facets of feedback administration and the use of the results in institutions worldwide. There is a common theme running through a majority of the chapters and that is the recognition of the need to act on student feedback and thus improve teaching and learning in universities.

In this publication, we draw upon international perspectives on the importance and use of student feedback in the higher education setting. The book not only looks at the current literature on student feedback but it also focuses on experiences of the individual authors, some of whom have covered international perspectives and trends as well as their individual national circumstances. In addition to being experts in their particular disciplines, many of the contributors are also researchers and practitioners in the area of student feedback.

In brief, the parts and chapters are:

Part 1: Overview

Chapter 1: The nexus of feedback and improvement

Lee Harvey of the Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) discusses the landscape of factors impacting on student feedback in higher education. The chapter situates student feedback in the current higher education context internationally and provides an overview of the debates surrounding the topic. In particular, it underlines the fact that student surveys and feedback have little effect without being incorporated in a strategy involving acting on student feedback and also informing students of the actions taken to motivate them to participate in feedback provision in the future.

Part 2: International perspectives

Chapter 2: Student feedback in the US and global contexts

Fernando Padró of Cambridge College, USA, provides a glimpse of the controversies, dilemmas and issues of using student feedback from the perspective of performance management of units and staff in the USA. The chapter points to the abundance of surveys currently utilised for various aspects of higher education, while underlining the significance of incorporating student feedback into systematic institutional decision-making. The chapter further argues that the challenges may be found in the purposes for which student feedback surveys are utilised. Fernando highlights the potential for the clash of cultures between external stakeholders (who tend to perceive tertiary education as a service) and academics (who tend to view tertiary education as a transformative and developmental