Facilitating a partnership learning community: a novel analytical protocol for understanding free-text feedback comments from students

Research output: Contribution to conference (unpublished)Abstractpeer-review

Abstract

In building a ‘partnership learning community’ institutions must address pitfalls of ‘scale’ whereby only a small number of students participate and thereby benefit from community-building initiatives (Healy et al., 2014). This implies that success is contingent on all students having a voice in the partnership. Surveys have long been used to elicit student opinions, but limitations of Likert-scale questionnaires are well established as is the timeconsuming nature of analysing and responding to free-text comments in a meaningful way (Harvey, 2011). Nevertheless, systematic analysis of qualitative survey data has been shown to be an ‘effective and robust tool’ whereby students can ‘influence decision making […] in university life’ (Shah et al., 2017: 101). We propose a flexible, scalable stepwise protocol for analysis of free-text comments that enables rigorous, in-depth semiautomated linguistic analysis by non-specialists that is accessible to both individual academics and those with broader institutional responsibilities. We argue that by making meaningful analysis of freetext comments faster, this protocol has the potential to help staff gain a clearer understanding of nuances in student voices as part of an inclusive and dialogic approach to putting all students at the heart of responding to feedback.

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