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Fri, Nov 7, 4:00 - 4:30, Kachina A Paper (refereed)

Recommended Citation: Tastle, W J and B A White. Analysis of IS/IT Student Assessment of Courses and Instruction Instruments. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2008, v 25 (Phoenix): §2742. ISSN: 1542-7382.

Analysis of IS/IT Student Assessment of Courses and Instruction Instruments

Refereed

11 pages

William J. Tastle    [a1] [a2]
Department of Management
Ithaca College    [u1] [u2]
Ithaca, New York, USA    [c1] [c2]

Bruce A. White    [a1] [a2]
Department of Computer Information Systems
Quinnipiac University    [u1] [u2]
Hamden, Connecticut, USA    [c1] [c2]

Student assessment of course instruments from 10 colleges/universities are analyzed to determine the degree of consistency among items deemed important in IS/IT courses. A matrix of general categories and subcategories is identified and the instruments from the 10 institutions are tallied to produce a frequency distribution from which the data are normalized via a probability distribution. The subcategories are ranked and examined. Since these instruments are used to assess teaching effectiveness and play a strong role in tenure and promotion decisions, an argument is made in support of measures better suited for the analysis of ordinal data. Most questions on assessment instruments involve the use of the Likert scale, which is ordinal, but the statistics most commonly used are applicable to ratio and interval scales. The use of the mean in making critical ranking decisions is shown to lack conceptual soundness; measures of consensus and agreement offer much better comparative and analytical results. The calculation of agreement distances is illustrated.

Keywords: course assessment, faculty assessment, consensus, agreement

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