Fabricating the student experience

Abstract

The increased use of student experience survey questionnaires in higher education such as NSSE (USA), AUSSE (AU), ETLQ (UK), and NSS (UK), can be seen as vital parts of an ongoing transition towards a subtle neoliberal governance that works through institutions’ self-correction in relation to politically defined indicators. Recently new automated feedback functions that invite students to compare their responses to a numerical average have been added to some of these survey questionnaires, which indicates that the survey questionnaires are also aiming at cognitive or behavioral change among students. However, the question of whether the survey questionnaires also have performative effects on the students has gained only little attention in research. Addressing this gap, the article presents a small qualitative interview study focusing on students in Finland and Denmark and their encounter with the student survey questionnaires of their country: HowULearn (FI) and the Learning Barometer (DK). The study unfolds within an actor-network-theoretic framework in which survey questionnaire technologies are conceptualised as actors that carry particular normativities with them, yet open to interpretation and mediation by students and others. While previous research suggests that the student survey questionnaires represent a political appropriation of students’ voices, the study shows that complex distributed negotiations play out in students’ encounters with the survey questionnaires. The findings have implications for how we understand the performative effects of student experience survey questionnaires in terms of student conduct.