Purpose of the USE
The purpose of the Unit of Study Evaluation (USE) system is to provide information for unit of study coordinators seeking to assess the effectiveness of units of study in order to plan and implement teaching and learning improvements. The focus of the system is on the unit of study and not the individual or the faculty. The key outputs of the USE system are intended to be:
- Documentation of the quality of units of study and an indication of how units of study effectively contribute to the overall quality of students' learning experiences in a degree.
- Recommendations by unit of study co-ordinators in the form of documented strategies which will maintain, or further improve, the teaching and learning quality of individual units.
In addition to students' numerical ratings of their teaching and learning experiences, the Unit of Study Evaluation system encourages unit of study coordinators to draw upon other data from students, academic colleagues and their own insights as teachers. In doing so it recognises that issues of teaching context must be considered in the evaluation of individual units of study. These include; class size, available resources, and the compulsory or elective nature of student enrolments, amongst others. The unit of study coordinator is ideally placed to integrate data on these factors. As such, information generated by the USE system (the statistical reports of the students' ratings and the surveys containing their explanations for these ratings) is returned initially to unit of study co-ordinators.
The USE data is intended to support staff in improving teaching. Such improvements are often most effective when they are focussed and strategically aligned with faculty initiatives. As such, some of the USE survey items correspond to the factor scales of the university's teaching quality assurance survey - the Student Course Experience Questionnaire (SCEQ), which is used to monitor teaching quality and inform strategic teaching initiatives at a faculty level. Because of this correspondence between the USE survey items and the SCEQ factor scales, it can provide staff of the department, school or faculty with an indication of the relative contributions of different units of study, to faculty performance on the SCEQ factor scales.
Similarly, the USE system does not focus on an individual's performance.
"The purpose of the student evaluation is to assess the effectiveness of the Unit of Study and not staff performance." (Academic Board Resolution; The Management and Evaluation of Teaching, Part 5.2 (1), page 13)Such purposes are served by more individualised processes. Staff wishing to investigate and document their own teaching, for promotion and self development purposes, are encouraged to visit the section of the ITL website on Feedback for Teachers or contact the ITL to discuss the best methods to employ.
