Impact of noninstructional factors on undergraduate student evaluation of teaching

Abstract

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Student evaluation of teaching (SET) has become a tool of widespread use in most developed countries for assessing teaching in higher education. The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of noninstructional factors on SET. The study was carried out at the Pontifical University of Comillas, a private Spanish university, on a sample of 136,612 SETs, in which 826 teachers and 511 different subjects were evaluated over a time period of four years (2016–2019). Only undergraduate subjects were considered, and we worked with two of the centers at the Pontifical University of Comillas: the business school and the engineering school. All the data included in this analysis were obtained from official university surveys that were developed by a team of professionals specializing in teaching quality who were responsible for ensuring the reliability of the information. Combining two complementary techniques, regression and regression trees, we were able to confirm the central hypothesis of the study: there are relevant differences across courses, depending on the discipline.