ADVANTAGES OF USING SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS TO ANALYSE STUDENT EVALUATIONS OF TEACHING

Surveys to evaluate teaching performance are one of the most widely used instruments for assessing teaching capabilities and, consequently, the quality of teaching. Their success is largely due to how they are designed and the way in which they process information. The aim of this paper is to simplify the design of the student evaluations by removing the most correlated items, and to propose that Kohonen’s self-organizing Kohonen maps be used to group teachers in accordance with all the characteristics surveyed. The methodology is applied to the particular case of the Rovira i Virgili University.