Correlation between the course evaluation at LTH and the implementation of constructive alignment

Abstract

The constructive alignment (CA) theory of Biggs is widely known and employed at the Technical Faculty of Lund University (LTH), where about 1000 courses of several programs are registered in a single academic year. Additionally, LTH has introduced a database that has collected the students’ feedback on the courses since 2003 (course experience questionnaire=CEQ). We have looked at information about coursed held in the 2009/10 academic year with the purpose to comparing courses with poor and outstanding measures. We have designed a simple questionnaire to gather supplementary data from the course leaders and attempted to correlate CA implementation with the reported feedback in CEQ. Although we could highlight some differences in between two groups of courses formed by the CEQ data, indicating that CA might have been better understood and applied in those courses with better feedback, we did not observed sharp distinction. A more thorough investigation with higher number of courses and extended questionnaire should improve the results and may reveal hidden differences.