The Effects of Students’ Perceptions of their Learning Experience on their Approaches to Learning: The Learning Experience Inventory in Courses (LEI-C)

The clarity of students’ perceptions of their teaching/learning environment is regarded as an important quality indicator of good teaching. The Learning Experience Inventory in Courses (LEI-C) is a 12-item instrument that is designed to assess how clearly students perceive what it is they are required to learn, what they should be doing to learn it appropriately, and what the requirements and standards of assessment are; together yielding a Clarity of Perception Index (CPI). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to establish the factor structure and internal consistency of the subscales comprising the LEI-C and the overall CPI. The LEI-C was administered to 1840 students in class in 37 courses in a Hong Kong university, together with the Study Process Questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F). A total of 1,002 valid responses were collected. Reliability and construct validity of the LEI-C were found to be satisfactory. The CPI was associated with high deep and low surface approaches to learning. These findings have important implications for quality assurance (QA) and especially quality enhancement (QE) of teaching. The LEI-C is a quickly administered instrument that can be used to assess the quality of ongoing teaching, and to pinpoint aspects of teaching that can be enhanced.