A Compositional Three-Way Approach for Student Satisfaction Analysis

Three-way rating data on student satisfaction contain the scores assigned by students to a set of items measuring different aspects of educational quality at different time points. Such data provide information on the magnitude of satisfaction as well as information on how aspects vary with respect to each other and how they contribute to the total satisfaction of each student. Data magnitude is predominant in determining variability patterns, thus, any standard tool applied to these arrays only yields a one-dimensional solution measuring scale differences. The relative changes among items go completely undetected unless a compositional approach is used in combination with a multilinear tool. A case study on student satisfaction is presented to demonstrate that this method provides an insightful analysis of the role played by each aspect in generating satisfaction throughout faculties and years.