Course content coverage as a measure of instructional quality

In order to measure instructional quality, several methods have been proposed in the literature, among them student performance on achievement tests and student ratings of the quality of instruction. Both methods have in common that they tend to ignore course content coverage, although this is an important determinant of instructional quality. In this article a procedure is described which is used to assess students' actual learning activities. This procedure, the Topic Checklist, makes use of student ratings. Reliability, validity, and utility studies were conducted. The results suggest that the Topic Checklist is a reliable and fairly valid procedure to evaluate course content coverage and to detect problem areas in a course, providing feedback useful for carrying out improvements.

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