Experiments on education as a service

As student satisfaction surveys are a primary method of evaluating university faculty teaching performance, it is essential to develop an understanding of the factors driving course evaluation. Here we discuss experiments conducted to investigate the value of various service actions in the classroom environment. In particular, we focus on the offering of excitement needs such as giving candy, humor, in-class demonstrations, music and the like. The experiments were conducted on a class of undergraduate students in a university in Daejeon, South Korea. SERVQUAL, KANO models and Kruskal-Wallace (or Wilcoxan) tests are employed. We demonstrate that there are statistically significant relationships between the service offerings and the students' perception; this perception can influence overall course evaluation. Thus, incorporating factors that are more commonly associated with other classes of service such as restaurant service or entertainment service may improve the perception of service quality in education. In addition, we observe a known phenomenon that, to our knowledge, has not been measured in educational service. Specifically, we observe that there is a statistically significant spillover effect from one time frame to another when a service is removed. That is, the service is remembered in course evaluations for some time even after it is removed; there is a service memory.