Exploratory Factor Analysis of a survey on group-exam experiences and subsequent investigation of the role of group familiarity

Abstract

We report on an exploratory study in which we investigate the factor structure of an in-development survey on student experiences during group exams and subsequently examine how these factors can be modelled using performance and self-reported performance measures, while focusing on the role of group familiarity because it is a measure we felt we could bolster through future intervention. We ran an Exploratory Factor Analysis on a suite of survey items that sought to investigate aspects of their group-exam experience, such as participation equity, the prevalence of productive group-work behaviours, and their personal experiences within the group. After stepwise item removal took us from an item pool of twenty-one down to fourteen, our Exploratory Factor Analysis saw a four-factor structure emerge as the preferred option, consistent with the dominant areas of focus of our underlying survey design. The four factors that emerged-presence of under-contributors, presence of dominators, productive group-work behaviours and personal experience-and the items that were removed as part of the factor analysis process indicate directions for future item development. These results suggest that our survey could be sensitive to the impact of interventions designed to improve overall student experience in group exams by targeting improvements in sense of academic familiarity with their groupmates, participation equity or productive group-work behaviours.