Students' participation in the internal quality assurance system and their role in enhancing learning

Quality assurance has seen many improvements since the Bologna Process in 1999 and internal quality assurance (IQA) systems have been emerging in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), looking forward to the transparency and accreditation of study programs across Europe. Furthermore, quality systems should be focused on the improvement of students’ experiences and, therefore, their learning. In this context, the effective involvement of students in the internal quality assurance system is vital to assure the enhancement process of teaching and learning and, consequently, the overall educational process. Despite the variety of ways to obtain students’ feedback, the most commonly used method by IQA systems is the pedagogical questionnaires. These have become an increasingly established way for students to have their voices taken into account. In this way, students can share their point of view, which is fundamental, because they have a clear and transparent perception of what is going well, as well as what is lacking in their study cycles, providing useful information for the IQA system. For this reason, these questionnaires are extremely important, and only with students’ contribution, HEIs can act towards to improve. Given the new developments of quality assurance, the purpose of the present paper is to emphasize the importance of students’ involvement in the internal quality assurance system and propose methods to achieve it. Firstly, to understand the students' opinions regarding the pedagogical questionnaires, simple questions were applied to students of the University of Minho. The results showed that almost half of the students are unaware of the importance of their role in enhancing the quality of their HEI. To overcome this problem, HEIs might need to adjust their methodologies and processes to increase students’ involvement in quality assurance. To this end, new strategies to capture students’ attention and to improve the quality assessment are proposed