Students’ Educational Experience: The Conceptualization and Development of a Tool for the Assessment of Education Quality

Abstract

To assess and manage the quality of education it is important to understand what happens to students at university, what experience they gain, and whether this experience contributes to their success and development. In foreign science student experience is considered as a student-centered idea of improving the quality of higher education and a prerequisite for many initiatives in this area. However, the approaches to its study require major revision. This article presents the study which allows the students’ educational experience to be conceptualized. To diagnose and analyze the students’ educational experience a valid and reliable tool has been created. Educational experience is defined as students’ representations which are significant from the standpoint of academic success, students’ readiness for self-education and self-development, and subjective well-being. These students’ representations are the representations of the following: their educational and professional activities, themselves as the subjects of their educational and professional activities, learning and social context. The students’ educational experience is presented in the aggregate of five components: satisfaction, intention to expand experience, self-efficacy and support, self-regulated learning experience, and engagement. The analysis of the holistic experience and its components allows not only to assess the student’s subjective perception of learning, but also to predict the effectiveness of the educational process based on understanding of the key internal factors of academic performance, subjective well-being and development. The article presents a questionnaire of students' educational experience, verified on a sample of students (N=479). It meets the psychometric requirements of internal consistency, retest reliability, content, construct and criterion validity. This questionnaire can be used to control the quality of education, to do scientific research and evidence-based pedagogical experimentation in the context of the restructuring higher education.