The time has just flown by! It’s been five months. I have been busy but with the baby, I have just neglected this website a bit. Anyway, just to let you know that our paper on the NSS is now published. This was a fun project with Lee Shepherd. For those of you who are unaware, in UK higher education there is an annual survey which students, the NSS. The NSS takes a multidimensional approach and argues that the survey questions make up eight different subscales. These subscales are used in all sorts of metrics but are also used within universities for policy. So, we had a look. Using some ‘fancy’ clustering algorithms to explore structure in the data, we found no support for the existence of the proposed eight subscales. Even for courses from the same university, we found different structures in the data. This could be due to our methodology but it could also point to variable structures. Especially depending on the level of analysis we might find different structures (e.g., looking at course level versus at university level). We believe therefore these subscales should be used with caution and we need more evidence that they are measuring what they are argued to be measuring. More information in our paper
I am working on a follow up project, more about that soon!