Student Evaluations as Effective Indicators of Learning Outcomes：Evi-dence from Japanese University Students in English Language Courses

摘要

The term“student learning outcomes”refers to the knowledge, skills, and abilitiesthat students achieve during a course, and is typically assessed based on student evaluations conducted at the end of the semester. Previous studies in this area have investigated the effects of instructional quality and academic demands separately and have been limited primarily to examin⁃ing findings using student samples fromthe United States. With Japanese college students ’perceptions of self-improvementin English language courses as the dependent variable, the present study directly tests the hypothesis that students who perceive in⁃structional quality to be higher, andcourse demands to be greater, also estimate higher levels of self-improvement inEnglish lan⁃guage skills. The analysis provides strong support for this hypothesis.Higher ratings of instruction and academic demands have al⁃ready beenshown to increase levels of student learning (Greimel-Fuhrmann and Geyer 2003;Nois and Hudson 2006;McFadden and Dart 1992). The present study is the first toprovide direct evidence of the relative importance of student evaluations ofinstruc⁃tional quality and academic demands as predictors of student learning and thefirst ever to do so with a sample of Japanese college students enrolled in a requiredEnglish as a foreign language course. Our hypothesis is that Japanese students whoperceive instruc⁃tional quality to be higher, and course demands to be greater,estimate higher levels of self-improvement in English language skills. Thus we testJapanese students’attitudes toward instructional quality and course demands asindependent variables predicting their perceptions of self-improvement in English language courses. The research focuses on Japanese students ’improvement in English language skills because English education in Japan is an arena in which thedebate over limited English proficiency rages on, and because other research suggests reconsideration of English education in light of the demands of the rapidly expanding global era (Amaki 2008).