engleski

Psychometric properties of a Croatian version of student experience survey

Background. Student experience and engagement are becoming increasingly important aspects of quality assurance in higher education. National level student surveys have been established in several countries (NSS in UK, NSSE in USA, ISSE in Ireland, CEQ in Australia and China etc.). Agency for Science and Higher Education (ASHE) has developed a similar questionnaire on student experience and engagement in higher education. The purpose of this study is to test reliability of this questionnaire and explore its factor structure. Methods. In 2016 students who had enrolled in an undergraduate study program in academic year 2012/2013 were contacted by e- mail and asked to ll in an online questionnaire. The questionnaire comprised 288 questions on various aspects of student experience and engagement, and some demographic data. We selected 98 items related to student attitudes organized in 19 sections (dimensions) and measured on a 7 point ordinal scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Out of 2432 students who accessed the online survey, 695 completed all analyzed questions. We used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify number of dimensions and their structure. Results. Descriptive statistics ranged from 2.97 to 5.71 (mean), 1.38 to 2.20 (standard deviation), 2 to 6 (median), -1.36 to 0.66 (skewness), -1.36 to 1.30 (kurtosis). All items covered full range of values from 1 to 7. Overall KMO MSA was 0.97 with item MSA ranging between 0.70 and 0.98. Principal axis factor analysis on Pearson correlation matrix with oblimin rotation identied 14 dimensions (parallel analysis and BIC) explaining 58% of total variance. Cronbach alpha of the whole scale was 0.98 with ITCC ranging from 0.11 to 0.78. Only one item had ITCC<0.3, and 10 items had ITCC<0.4. There was a good correspondence between factors and questionnaire sections. Items from one or two sections loaded on each factor, and some sections were divided between two factors. Conclusion. EFA helped identify items that should be rephrased or removed from the questionnaire. We will use these results to design a shorter version of student experience survey. Further research on association between this scale and performance in studying, as well as collection of data on a representative sample of student population are needed before we can use survey results in policy making.

student experience survey, exploratory factor analysis

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