THE DEVELOPMENT, VALIDATION AND APPLICATION OF THE COURSE EXPERIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE

The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is a development of work ori ginally carried out at Lancaster University in the 1980s. It is used a s a measure of perceived teaching quality in degree programmes in nati onal annual surveys of all graduates in the Australian higher educatio n system and is increasingly being employed as a measure of the qualit y of teaching in universities in the UK. This article discusses the de velopment and use of the CEQ and the construction of a new generic ski lls scale. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of large multi disciplinary samples a students and graduates from several universitie s established the reliability and validity of both the full and short forms of the instrument, and identified a two-factor higher order stru cture. The criterion validity of the instrument was also established, with scores on the CEQ demonstrating positive correlations with studen ts' approaches to learning, perceived course satisfaction, academic ac hievement and reported generic ('enterprise') skills development. The instrument also demonstrated discriminant validity via its capacity to differentiate between pedagogically distinct programmes. These result s confirm the validity and usefulness of the CEQ as a performance indi cator a university teaching quality.