Improving real estate and other business courses through targeted student assessment

Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education, 2002 by Manning, Chris

Given that the Module 1 Coordinator's responsibility included the integration of topic material from four disciplines taught by four different faculty teaching four customized courses, the challenge of devising a course improvement plan was greatly complicated over what individual real estate faculty face when attempting to improve one of their courses.5 Fortunately, the additional assessment challenges and complications offered an unusual opportunity to "start fresh" in thinking about how to improve any business course, and particularly the real estate courses taught by the author. The following assessment plan, along with the author's reasons and experience, is provided to assist other real estate (and business) faculty to develop their own overall course assessment plans and questionnaires to improve the quality of their courses over time.

The primary value of the first of these three additional assessments is that it is administered early enough in a course to enable real estate faculty to adjust their teaching style, pedagogy, assignments, etc. before the course is over (Cohen, 1980). (The first of these additional three assessment instruments is illustrated for the author's undergraduate Real Estate Finance and Investments course in Exhibit 1, a blank midsemester questionnaire. A summary of student comments received on a comparable questionnaire from ten students taking the author's Executive MBA Financial Management course is shown in Exhibit 2 to illustrate the usefulness of information typically gathered.) Not only does asking this type of assessment question before the end of a term provide faculty with an opportunity to improve their scores on their formal end-of-term university-wide student evaluations, but also the number of assessment questions needed to be asked of students at the end of a course is greatly reduced.6

It is suggested that the second and third of these additional course quality assessment areas be administered at the end of a particular course (in class) in order to provide students with the greatest perspective when looking back over their experience in a course before offering their recommendations on improving it. (Exhibit 3 is a blank end-of-term questionnaire for the author's same undergraduate Real Estate Finance and Investments course as Exhibit 2. Exhibit 4 reports the author's spring, 2000, student responses on the Exhibit 3 instrument. Exhibit 5 is the first page of the author's syllabus describing the course, learning objectives, texts required, prerequisites and assignments.) It is also suggested that the second and third course quality assessment areas be combined into one questionnaire, given at the same time to minimize class disruption. This end-of-term questionnaire should also be given to students following the formal university-wide student evaluations as near the course end as possible in order to provide the student as much perspective as possible in offering the instructor constructive suggestions on improving a course and to spread the student's end-ofterm in-class assessment burden over two classes.