Student satisfaction: what it means to teaching and learning of undergraduate engineering units

This paper describes teaching enhancements the author used to improve student satisfaction ratings in three higher year undergraduate Mechanical Engineering units. Improvements to student satisfaction and feedback rates were obtained by applying Central Queensland University’s 7 principles of good teaching and the author’s new innovative teaching approach, called the ‘four-point teaching and learning strategy’ to make red units green and good units excellent. The research question is to analyse how effective is the author’s four-point teaching and learning strategy to student satisfaction and their learning journey. Student satisfaction ratings and attrition rates, as well as student grades are compared over a few years to identify trends. These approaches were presented to other engineering colleagues, some of whom employed them with an overall improvement in student learning being noticed in recent terms. This paper deals with the Scholarship of Teaching where an instructor uses a systematic approach and a rational framework employing the new 4-point strategy to make changes to unit delivery to improve student learning and satisfaction, as well as to reduce attrition.