What do teachers think about quality in the Spanish university?
| Published date | 20 April 2012 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09684881211219352 |
| Pages | 91-109 |
| Date | 20 April 2012 |
| Author | Marta Barandiaran‐Galdós,Miren Barrenetxea Ayesta,Antonio Cardona‐Rodríguez,Juan José Mijangos del Campo,Jon Olaskoaga‐Larrauri |
| Subject Matter | Education |
What do teachers think about
quality in the Spanish university?
Marta Barandiaran-Galdo
´s
Department of Applied Economics V, University of the Basque Country,
Bilbao, Spain
Miren Barrenetxea Ayesta
Department of Industrial Economics, University of the Basque Country,
Bilbao, Spain
Antonio Cardona-Rodrı
´guez
Department of Financial Economics I, University of the Basque Country,
Bilbao, Spain
Juan Jose
´Mijangos del Campo
Department of Industrial Economics, University of the Basque Country,
Bilbao, Spain, and
Jon Olaskoaga-Larrauri
Department of Business Administration, University of the Basque Country,
Bilbao, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to present the opinions of teaching staff at Spanish universities
regarding the relative importance of a number of quality factors, and perceived levels of development
of those factors in the context of their work.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes an empirical approach, with the opinions of
teaching staff being collected via questionnaires and by telematic means.
Findings – Lecturers surveyed are particularly pessimistic in regard to the conditions in which
students enter university, and probably do not share the priorities that education policy authorities
and university management bodies proclaim in their discourses and policies.
Research limitations/implications – This research may be supplemented with the use of more
qualitative methods and extended to other geographical and cultural contexts.
Practical implications – The opinions of teaching staff comprise useful information for the design
of education policies and quality management systems applicable to Spanish universities.
Originality/value – No studies have to date been conducted in Spain to identify the opinions of
university teaching staff in regard to determinants of quality. Taken as a whole, the paper enables a
diagnostic analysis to be made of university education quality conditions in Spain from the viewpoint
of teaching staff.
Keywords Quality,Higher education,Diagnosis, Spain, Academicstaff, Universities,Educational policy
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Attempting to draw up a detailed, definitive list of the determining factors in quality of
education is just as difficult a task as it sounds.
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What do teachers
think?
91
Quality Assurance in Education
Vol. 20 No. 2, 2012
pp. 91-109
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0968-4883
DOI 10.1108/09684881211219352
Firstly, the difficulty lies in the very nature of the education process, which evades
analytical approaches, and whose results depend more on the right combination of
resources than on which ones are used.
Secondly, “quality of education” at universities, and indeed elsewhere, is not
sufficiently well defined as a concept: the term refers to a complex, not fully known
process of teaching and learning, which furthermore is impossible to judge other than
through a system of values which are not always explicit (Harvey and Green, 1993).
Finally, just to make things even more complicated, there are reasons to believe that
what people see as important varies according to circumstance. It is only human to
attribute greater importance to those factors which are found to be absent in a given
situation: it is precisely their absence that makes them stand out, inundate the
discourses of stakeholders and bias their opinions.
The research underlying this article has been conducted to establish the opinion of
Spanish university lecturers regarding the factors that influence the quality of
university education and thus reach a necessary diagnosis at a time when the Spanish
university is the object of different initiatives that require greater attention to the
question of quality.
Assessing the quality of university education using the opinions of the relevant
stakeholders has become a cliche
´in the relevant literature. The most common form of
such consultations in the English-speaking world is the SET (Pounder, 2007), which
stands for Students’ Evaluation of Teaching. SETs are generally conducted via
surveys in which students are asked to give their opinions on certain aspects of the
education that they have received and on their teachers. SETs are built up on the basis
of a theory, albeit an implicit, a priori one, as to what factors make for quality
education. They are designed as tools for use with information systems at universities,
and as such have little relation to the approach used in this study. There are other
initiatives, which are scientific in their contents and purposes, and seek to determine
the aspects of education to which students attribute most value. This can be seen as an
attempt to identify the determining factors in education quality (Voss and Gruber,
2006; Lagrosen et al., 2004; Hill et al., 2003). These papers show that the perception of
students regarding what constitutes first-rate teaching has less to do with the quality
of the content taught and taken on board in classes and more to do with other aspects
such as their relationship with the lecturer (accessibility, enthusiasm, good mood) and
the extent to which the teaching process helps them to pass their exams and get a job.
Employers have also been subjected to surveys and other procedures with a view to
learning their ideas about what quality means in university education (Institute of
Directors, 2007; Gonza
´lez and Wagenaar, 2003; Hodges and Burchell, 2003;
Garcı
´a-Montalvo and Mora, 2000). They are usually asked what skills they value
most among graduates (generally expressed in terms of competences). In their case the
idea is not to determine what factors are conducive to quality in education but rather
what its visible features are: for instance, it may be concluded that quality education
produces graduates with competences a, b, c and d. A review of these papers
(Olaskoaga et al., 2009) shows that employers are not fully satisfied with the education
received by university graduates, and that they are more concerned with attitudinal
aspects and general cognitive skills than with the specific knowledge that graduates
acquire during their time at university.
QAE
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