Quality of educational services from the viewpoints of students; SERVQUAL model

By studying the gap between expectations and perceptions of students from educational services, we can provide the base for developing appropriate programs for the improvement of educational services. This study was performed to assess the quality of educational services from the viewpoint of allied health sciences students in Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 170 allied health sciences students were selected by simple random sampling method in 2010. The standard SERVQUAL questionnaire including the two parts of individual characteristics and the five educational service quality dimensions was used for data collection. Data were analyzed by SPSS 16 using descriptive statistics and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, one-way variance analysis, Tukey’s post hoc test and paired T-test.

There was a quality gap in all educational service quality dimensions and the related measuring phrases. The highest average of quality gap was observed in the empathy (-1.57) and then in tangibles (-1.55), responsiveness (-1.42) and reliability (-1.40), respectively. The lowest average belonged to assurance (-1.31). There was a statistically significant relationship between the quality gap in different dimensions of educational service quality and its related phrases (p<0.001).

Expectations of students are beyond their perception from current situation and their expectations are not met in any of service dimensions. To improve the quality of educational services, all the dimensions especially empathy should be in priority.