Quality assurance in post‐secondary education: the student experience

A major focus of the recent research into the quality of post‐secondary education is the centrality of the student experience. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on studies addressing such a focus to shed light on how quality assurance (QA) practices can be improved.

The paper reviews some of the approaches to addressing the quality issues from the viewpoints of students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness, students' programme experiences, students' total experiences, student satisfaction and service quality, and some of the quantitative instruments that have been developed for measuring the respective constructs.

The employment of student surveys using self‐report inventories/questionnaires with established reliability, validity and diagnostic power has the potential to transform both the external and internal quality‐monitoring mechanisms now being practiced in post‐secondary education, and help shift the focus of QA activities more to the enhancement‐led views.

To cope with the complexity of the education system and to get quality into it, this paper promotes the practice of conducting student surveys by taking reference from the relevant research literature and adopting a rigorous approach to developing and improving data‐collection instruments to tap into the students' experiences, so that the QA activities of educational institutions are research informed, evidence based and enhancement led.