An application of importance-performance analysis to students’ evaluation of teaching

Students’ feedback is usually gathered in institutions of higher education to evaluate the teaching quality from the students’ perspective, using questionnaires administered at the end of the courses. These evaluations are useful to pinpoint the course strengths, identify areas of improvement, and understand the factors that contribute to students’ satisfaction. They are an important mechanism for improving the teaching and learning processes. However, there is little standardisation in how this kind of feedback is collected, analysed, and used, and their active use for improving the teaching and learning processes is low. Additionally, students are rarely asked if they consider that those aspects included in the questionnaires are really important; this information would allow relativizing students’ evaluations of teaching. This research proposes the use of importance-performance analysis (IPA) together with a student’s evaluation of teaching questionnaire as a tool for lecturers to collect, analyse, and interpret the data obtained from the student’s feedback. This work shows how using IPA lecturers can obtain a visual representation of what teaching attributes are important for their students, how important each attribute is, and how well the instructors performed on each attribute from their students’ point of view. The usefulness of this tool for lecturers to assess students’ evaluation of their teaching and to guide the course programming in higher education is shown.