ADAPTATION OF THE COURSE EXPERIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE TO A PORTUGUESE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

Abstract

The Course Experience Questionnaire has emerged in Australia, in 1981, to evaluate the teaching quality of certain degree programs. Since then, it has been applied in different countries and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

In this work, the original questionnaire, consisting of 36 Likert-scale questions, was reproduced at Moodle, and data was gathered from 84 respondents. The sample was taken from the population of students attending the Probability and Statistics course, in the first semester of 2022/2023, of the Bachelor degree of Electric and Computer Engineering at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Porto. The data was analyzed using Factor Analysis. From the 36 questions, was selected a set of 23 questions, which deemed appropriate for the Portuguese engineering context. These prompted the identification of four relevant dimensions/factors for evaluating HEI’s quality: Generic skills, Teaching professionality, Appropriate workload, and Appropriate assessment. The results were presented in an informative graph, allowing for a clear and concise visualization of the overall teaching evaluation of the curricular unit of Probability and Statistics.

We remark that this research was solely directed to that specific students’ population, thus, we should be cautious when generalizing. This is, however, a case study which might contribute to the development of a useful tool for HEI’s evaluation and the improvement of Engineering Education’s quality in Portugal. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of adapting evaluation tools to specific institutional contexts, namely, in Portugal.