Surveys and Evaluation

Surveys and evaluations constitute a valuable means of obtaining information about stakeholder viewpoints to support quality assurance and improvement and have long been recognised as an effective tool across the tertiary education sector for collecting feedback from students, staff, and industry partners. In recent years, student feedback has also become a critical component of institutional research and planning for strategic decision-making within higher education institutions.

The benefits of surveys/evaluations are that they, inter alia:

• are appropriate for gathering responses on many issues at various levels
• Are inclusive (assuming a census and a good response rate)
• have a mixed methods approach, i.e. they can collect both quantitative and qualitative data
• can provide comparisons and trends over time, and
• are not time-consuming for participants compared to other methods of collecting feedback (provided they are well-designed).

The Surveys & Evaluation SIG aims to provide an open and collaborative space for those working in the survey space in the tertiary education sector, where we can share best practices and innovative work in this area.

Cassandra Saunders is Chair of the Surveys & Evaluation SIG, and Jason Mazanov is Lead of Qualitative Research and Analysis that sits under this SIG.

If you would like to know more about this SIG or have an idea/suggestion about a particular topic that you would like discussed, please don’t hesitate to contact us.