Indicatori statistici per la valutazione della qualità della didattica universitaria: una proposta metodologica

Abstract

The measurement of the teaching quality is nowadays one of the basic target if the university training offer wants to be optimised. With respect to this, the law n. 370/99 represented a strong incentive to the search for techniques aimed to the identification of indicators which are capable to adequately measure the university teaching quality. However, numerous statistical methods exist which attempt to identify appropriate indicators. In this work we firstly analyse the main quantitative techniques from which it is possible to achieve multidimensional gross indicators. Afterwards, we propose an alternative methodological procedure. Its main feature is that the resulting quantitative measure of synthesis does not require any preventive numerical transformation of the modalities of the ordinal qualitative variables observed. Furthermore, it is independent from both theoretical constraints and the arbitrary effect of individual choices. Lastly, as an empirical application and for comparative purposes, we carry out an analysis while using the new qualitative indicator. To this end, we use data from questionnaires submitted to the students of the University of Foggia during the academic year 2000-2001.