An Assessment of Statistical Process Control-Based Approaches for Charting Student Evaluation Scores

Abstract

We compare three control charts for monitoring data from student evaluations of teaching (SET) with the goal of improving student satisfaction with teaching performance. The two charts that we propose are a modified p chart and a z-score chart. We show that these charts overcome some of the shortcomings of the more traditional charts for analyzing SET data. A comparison of three charts (an individual’s chart, the modified p chart, and the z-score chart) reveals that the modified p chart is the best approach for analyzing SET data because it utilizes distributions that are appropriate for categorical data, and its interpretation is more straightforward. We conclude that administrators and faculty alike can benefit by using the modified p chart to monitor and improve teaching performance as measured by student evaluations.