Teaching or Service? A Proposed Model Developed for Student Evaluation of Teaching Quality from the Perspective of “Teaching as a Service”^*

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is one of the most commonly used instruments to measure teaching quality. Its use in higher education is important because it benefits multiple parties. It benefits students because they can voice out their comments on the teaching they receive. It benefits teachers because they can adjust their teaching according to student feedback. Universities also benefit because they can understand the overall teaching performance of their academics. Despite the respondents of the questionnaires for teaching quality evaluation are students, most of these evaluation tools may not be able to reflect students’ perceptions toward the teaching they have received because these tools are usually developed from the universities’ perspective for the purposes of promotions or salary raises. To better reflecting the perceived teaching quality students have experienced, we developed a set of teaching quality evaluation tool adopted from the popular PZB (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry) service quality (SERVQUAL) measurement instrument. Our research model and measurement instrument are tested using surveys with two samples of 358 and 220 recruited from undergraduates in one of the universities in Macau in 2017 and 2023, respectively. The results revealed that, among the five SERVQUAL dimensions, Empathy and Reliability dimensions significantly affected students’ satisfaction towards their teachers, while the Responsiveness dimension did not have such an impact. The Tangible dimension had no impact on satisfaction toward teachers but directly influenced the overall course satisfaction. Satisfaction toward teachers had a significant impact on students’ perceived overall course satisfaction. The impact of Assurance on teaching quality differed between the two cohorts. For researchers, this study demonstrates the suitability of adopting SERVQUAL, a commercial service quality evaluation tool with items revised to fit education context, can effectively measure students’ satisfaction on their learning. For educators, our study sheds light on the directions for teachers to allocate their efforts to help students increase learning effectiveness through their satisfaction on their learning process.