Accessing the Student Voice: Using CEQuery to identify what retains students and promotes engagement in productive learning in Australian higher education

Accessing the Student Voice is the final report of a project funded by DEST's Higher Education Innovation Programme (HEIP). The research used CEQuery to analyse a data base of 280,000 comments on the national Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) from 90,000 students in 14 Australian Universities. The report identifies a set of quality assurance checkpoints for optimising student retention and ensuring that their learning is both engaging and productive. It makes recommendations on how to improve the quality of learning design, support, tracking and assessment and identifies the relative importance of these factors, noting how this varies by field of education.

CEQuery was developed with DEST funding in 2003 in order to analyse the extensive qualitative data generated each year by university graduates on the two open-ended questions of the CEQ, a survey administered by Graduate Careers Australia: What were the best aspects of your course?' and 'What aspects of your course are most in need of improvement?' The software automatically classifies comments on the CEQ into five main domains (Outcomes, Staff, Course Design, Assessment, and Support) and 26 subdomains. CEQuery was launched in 2004 and has been extensively implemented across the Australian higher education sector since that time.

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