Teaching Evaluation Questionnaire Validation at Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Applying the Method of Factor Analysis with Extraction of Principal Components

Abstract

This work validates a teaching evaluation instrument applied to professors in engineering, sciences and higher technological level programs of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional, using the method of Factor Analysis with extraction of principal components. The database used for the research was previously examined and refined due to inconsistency, eg. outliers, out of range values, etc. The result of the method described above was a reduced survey of 15 items, which was obtained from an original study of 33 items. This new questionnaire clearly identifies the four main dimensions or aspects required: teaching development and planning, teacher-student relationship, evaluation, and a global assessment question. The reduction of the evaluation scale will allow to improve the process of integral teaching performance evaluation of the faculty at Escuela Politécnica Nacional, and this method could serve as a benchmark for the teaching evaluation process of other universities that belong to the higher education system of Ecuador.

Keywords

• factor analysis
• teaching evaluation
• questionnaire validation
• principal components analysis