Developing an Instrument for Assessment of Academic Management in Engineering Courses

Abstract

Higher education in Brazil been expanding in recent years, although, one of the major problems encountered have been the evasion and failure rates in general courses and specifically in engineering undergraduate courses. In this context, educational evaluation, with the goal of diagnosing needs for improvement, can contribute to the quality of higher education, regarding some aspects such as teaching methodology, human interrelationships in the teaching profession and academic management, among others. This study is based on the analysis of the development and subsequent implementation of an assessment tool that would enable the analysis of academic and administrative expertise of academic management. The instrument consists of a list of 15 statements related to aspects of higher education management, where the target audience of the research are the teachers of 6 engineering courses at Federal University of Ceará (UFC), indicating their degree of agreement with the statements. For the analysis, a multivariate statistical tool called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used. The results show the feasibility of PCA to analyze aspects of academic management, by explaining relevant information extracted from the latent variables of the data, which allowed us to identify a group of clusters related to management of higher education in engineering within the UFC. The study points to the use of this information in the future related to the contents of external assessments through more robust and detailed mathematical analysis tools.

Estratégia de Análise Quantitativa para Revisão de Pré-requisitos em uma Matriz Curricular do Curso de Bacharelado em Sistemas de Informação

“…No contexto brasileiro, Nunes et al (2015) especificaram uma metodologia para avaliar o gerenciamento acadêmico, que foi aplicada especificamente para cursos de engenharia eé baseada na análise de componentes principais. As análises apontaram para três grupos ortogonais de características, classificadas como: Formação Acadêmica, Formação Profissional e Gestão do Ensino Superior.…”

Validation of the academic management evaluation instrument based on principal component analysis for engineering and technological courses

“…As noted, it was developed an instrument in the form of a poll, that containing 15 statements to obtain the informa-tion that were quantified (numerical data) (Nunes, et al, 2013) and (Nunes, et al, 2015).…”

“…The UFC's statute point out some directions that must be followed by the managers of the institution regarding the improvement of the quality in higher education. These statements had been previously presented in Nunes, et al (2013) and Nunes, et al (2015). Thus, we sought to investigate the applicability of Principal Components Analysis to achieve educational indicators for management courses and vocational formation in engineering, technology and related areas at Federal University of Ceará, based on the results of these indicators the coordination can manage the processes regarding better practices for the stutend formation.…”

“…Generally, education management has been studied subjectively, mainly by evaluating its qualitative aspects. However, this study seeks to contribute to the analysis of the educational context under a quantitative point of view regarding qualitative inferences, according to the researches that have been developed recently in a field called "Educametrics" (Silva, et al, 2012), (Vasconcelos et al, 2013), (Nunes, et al, 2013) and (Nunes, et al, 2015).…”

A crise de identidade dos cursos de Sistemas de Informação é percebida “além-muros” das universidades no sul do Brasil?

“…Na esfera acadêmica, trabalhos têm sido desenvolvidos para discutir questões curriculares como atualidade e capacidade de atrair novos estudantes, não somente no curso de SI, mas nos de computação como um todo [Digiampietri et al 2016] [Helfert e Duncan 2007] [Oliveira Nunes et al 2015. A evasão também tem preocupado a comunidade dos cursos de computação como um todo, pois conforme discutem Amorim (2015), Faquin e Araújo (2017), apenas 31% dos estudantes de cursos de tecnologia da informação e comunicação concluem seus cursos.…”