Abstract
Recently, “student ratings” of courses are becoming popular among Japanese colleges and universities in getting more information for Faculty Development (FD). The purpose of this paper is to propose a new threedimensional analysis incorporating the weight of factors in student evaluations of university courses.
It is useful for the policy of FD to consider the importance of factors. If we know which factors are the most important for students, we can improve our course performance more effectively.
Conjoint analysis was used to determine the important criteria. We translate not only the results of conjoint analysis (“utility” and“averaged importance”) but “students ratings” data in a three-dimensional bubble graph. This graph makes it possible to show faculties the priority of factors that must be improved in their courses. Four divisions of the graph, named “continue-factors”, “reexamine-factors”, “improve-factors” and “reduce factors” represent the features of the variables that are located in each division.
