Student Expectations and Perceived Service Quality in Atmospheric Science

Higher education (HE) is a service, and students are increasingly seen as its primary customers. This viewpoint is consistent with trends in pedagogy, since as primary customers, students co-produce their learning with faculty and staff, and participate in their own service delivery by providing membership, attendance, effort, and self-management. Perceived service quality influences students in several ways: attitudes towards HE, formal and informal evaluations of institutions and degree programs, satisfaction with various aspects of HE, and degree completion. Therefore, delivery of high quality HE service is of great importance to students as well as faculty, staff, and other stakeholders. The HE service quality literature is situated within the retailing, marketing, and management literatures. Studies in these traditions have established that differences between consumer expectation--both about the process of service delivery and the outcomes of a service--and their actual experiences, influence their perceptions of service quality. In order for faculty and staff to deliver high quality HE service and help students make the most of their educations, they must be aware of the importance of student expectations and help manage them when they are unrealistic. Because student expectations and the degree to which they are met vary by institution, instructor, student cohort, and individual student, a case study approach is recommended to clearly define the bounds and context of the study and thereby enhance its dependability and transferability. This preliminary study outlines how an atmospheric science program could gather information on the expectations of their majors--from admission through graduation--using a means-end chain approach with a hard laddering technique. The means-end chain approach can uncover important expectations and their meanings for students. Laddering techniques have been used in past studies of HE service quality to explicate chains of attributes and their associated consequences and values. Hard laddering is beneficial in that the same instrument can be distributed to faculty and staff to determine if there is a gap between what they think students expect, and the students’ actual expectations.