The goal of Leonie Payne’s PhD thesis — “Bringing Rigour to the Evaluation of Higher Education” — is to provide a sounder theoretical and statistical foundation for the analysis of student evaluations of teaching, gathered the world-over from student surveys. She’s developing a mathematical and conceptual model of bias that will assist those designing and analysing surveys to understand where and how bias may creep into the survey methodology used. Leonie has demonstrated how Monte Carlo resampling techniques show promise to assess the impact of “non-response bias”, in comparisons between faculty within a test dataset. Leonie plans to address the impact of a range of biases in the national QILT Student Experience Survey, and is interested in conducting a cross-institutional study making like-for-like comparisons between institutions.
In passing her Stage 1 seminar, conducted simultaneously in CIC to a (Covid-safe!) audience, and online, she impressed a distinguished reviewer panel: Lyn Alderman (Principal at The Evaluators Collective), Assoc. Prof. Jo McKenzie (former Director of the UTS Institute for Multimedia & Learning) and James Brown (ABS Professor of Official Statistics, UTS School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society). More details and replay on the event page, and you can connect with Leonie via twitter or email.