The role of students in the Docentia process after ten years of evaluation: Evaluating the teacher or the subject? That is the question.

Abstract

This paper proposes separating the survey of students’ satisfaction with their teachers from the survey of their satisfaction with the module, and presents the implementation of this process at the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL). Items linked to teacher performance were differentiated from those referring to the subject in the Docentia-ULL survey. The final teacher survey comprised 12 items. In order to compare it with the original 22-item sur- vey, we compared the results from the overall assessment of teachers in the original survey with a simulation of the result if the reduced survey had been applied in the period 2012- 2014 (n = 689), as well as with its actual application in the 2017-2019 rounds (n = 526). We observed an increase in Excellent teaching staff using the teacher survey and, to a lesser extent, Unfavourable teaching staff. We found that the teacher survey displayed a greater variance in overall student satisfaction com- pared to the subject survey. The results support the usefulness and validity of assessing student satisfaction through two different surveys. The two surveys would be relevant for different institutional assessment processes: the teacher survey for teacher promotion and the subject survey for degree accreditation. Adoption of the teacher survey by the university would have a positive impact on teachers’ intrinsic motivation, in particular by satisfying the needs for autonomy and competence by associating them with skills that they are in control of improving.