Department of Educational Psychology

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Browsing Department of Educational Psychology by browse.metadata.advisor "Bitzer, Eli"

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    2020-12-31 The role of student feedback in university teaching at a research-led university
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Petersen, Melanie; Bitzer, Eli; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. Educational Psychology
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT : Student feedback is widely accepted as a useful source of information about the quality of teaching and as a potential professional learning tool to enhance university teachers’ teaching. A review of the literature, however, revealed a shortage of systematic research about how student feedback influences university teachers’ teaching practices. A similar gap in knowledge was identified at Stellenbosch University. Preliminary studies at this institution indicated dissonance between university teachers’ perceptions of the potential value of student feedback and how they actually made use of student feedback in their teaching. In researchled university contexts, teaching is often perceived to have lower status than research. This study therefore set out to explore how university teachers at this particular research-led institution experienced the role of student feedback in their teaching. A case-study research design was followed, with the potential relationship between student feedback and university teaching practice at a research-led university constituting the unit of analysis. Qualitative data was generated by way of semistructured interviews with 16 purposely selected university teachers. Institutional policies relating to student feedback, teaching and learning and human resource management were also included as secondary sources of data to ascertain how university teachers’ experiences of student feedback related to institutional policy directives. Activity theory was used as analytical framework to interrogate the data. The findings of the study indicate that the research-led context at Stellenbosch University plays a significant role in how university teachers experience and respond to student feedback. The perceptions of research being more valued than teaching in terms of recognition and rewards, limits the optimal use of student feedback for the purpose of improving teaching. Raising the stature of teaching would thus be a necessary requirement for promoting the use of student feedback to improve teaching. Furthermore, the potential role of student feedback in university teaching practice at Stellenbosch is influenced by other subsystems, in particular the performance appraisal system. A concerted effort should be made at institutional level to come to a common understanding of what good teaching is considered to be. In the absence of such a common understanding, the growing culture of performativity has led to student feedback being reduced to a mere quantitative measure of the quality of teaching in many cases. Since mid-level university management carries the biggest responsibility for managing the performance appraisal processes in academic departments, they also exert a significant influence on how university teachers would use student feedback for professional learning and the enhancement of their teaching. The diverse practices followed by mid-level managers in the various academic departments represented in this study further pointed to the possible need for a guiding framework to support an ethics of practice approach to the use of student feedback. Based on its findings, this study is considered to have made a contribution to the body of knowledge regarding the contextual and relational nature of student feedback, particularly within a research-led university context.