Longitudinal Evaluations of Student Satisfaction With a Postgraduate Unit Using Importance-Performance Analysis

Abstract

The Australian tourism tertiary education sector operates in a competitive and dynamic environment, which necessitates a market orientation to be successful. Academic staff and management in the sector must regularly assess the perceptions of prospective and current students and monitor the satisfaction levels of current students. This study is concerned with the setting and monitoring of satisfaction levels of current students, reporting the results of three longitudinal investigations of student satisfaction in a postgraduate unit. The study also addresses a limitation of a university's generic teaching evaluation instrument. Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) has been recommended as a simple but effective tool for overcoming the deficiencies of many student evaluation studies, which have generally measured only attribute performance at the end of a semester. IPA was used to compare student expectations of the unit at the beginning of a semester with their perceptions of performance 10 weeks later. The first stage documented key benchmarks for which amendments to the unit based on student feedback could be evaluated during subsequent teaching periods.

A Comparison Study of Multinational Chain Hotel Employees’ Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility in China and Korea

“…IPA has been widely used since its first debut in 1977 by Martilla and James to measure the customer satisfaction of drivers (Lin et al 2009;Pike and Larkin 2010;Tafesse et al 2010). It is a graphic tool putting the importance measure on the vertical axis and the performance measure on the horizontal axis of a two-dimensional matrix.…”

Quality Demand for Online Bookstores

“…IPA was introduced by Martilla and James (1997) in 1977, who introduced a simple IPA framework that was applied to examine the performance of the automobile industry. IPA is a simple and effective analytical tool (Pike and Larkin, 2010). At present, it is commonly used in the evaluation research of service quality on customer satisfaction in the service industry as the criterion of market decision-making.…”

8 Years of institutional assessment feedback: students’ satisfaction with library services

“…Jackson et al (2005) examined the differences in library access, use and satisfaction of using library services and resources among faculty and students, with distinctions made between international and noninternational patrons affiliated with their hospitality management program. The heads of university libraries in Kenya were surveyed for their perceptions of the importance of various performance criteria (Pike and Larkin, 2010). Shi et al (2004) also focused only on faculty and administrators from eight science and engineering colleges and universities in the northeastern region of the USA.…”