Factors Influencing Teaching Quality in Universities: Analyzing Causal Relationships Based on Neutrosophic DEMATEL

Abstract

While teaching quality has been widely studied, this work advances the domain literature by evaluating the factors influencing teaching quality in order to determine their causal relationships and eventually identify those crucial factors. With ten factors obtained from a comprehensive review of literature, the neutrosophic decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is used to model these factors in the case of public universities in the Philippines. The DEMATEL handles the causal relationships among factors of teaching quality, while the vagueness associated with domain experts eliciting judgments within the DEMATEL is modeled in single-valued neutrosophic numbers. Findings reveal that individual characteristics, psychological characteristics, and institutional culture are key factors of teaching quality, while institutional resources and student composition are minor key factors. Higher education institutions (HEIs) must pay more attention to these factors in designing different initiatives, as they are crucial in shaping teaching quality. These findings offer important insights for HEIs in their recruitment and hiring decisions, strategic road mapping for building an institutional culture that values teaching quality, establishing student composition schemes, and resource allocation decisions for promoting institutional resources that drive teaching quality initiatives. Some policy takeaways and avenues for future works are also discussed.