Análise da percepção da imagem das casas de cultura estrangeira da UFC por meio da correlação entre o grau de expectativa e satisfação de seus alunos

Abstract

A major concern of organizations today is the evaluation of customer’s satisfaction concerning the provision of their services. Among them there is the provision of educational services in higher education, whether in the private or public sphere. There are some quality assessment models in specialized literature which include Gap’s model, Servqual scale, Servperf scale and Hedperf model. The latter was precisely conceived to assess the quality of services provided by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In this context, the practice of university extension developed by HEIs is an interdisciplinary, educational, cultural, scientific and political process that promotes transformative interaction between universities and other sectors of the society. Among the extension actions of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) there are the Casas de Cultura Estrangeira CCE (Foreign Culture Houses), perhaps the greatest foreign language teaching project among the Federal Institutions of Higher Education in Brazil. Thereby, this study aims to analyze the perception of the image of the foreign cultural Houses (CCE) of the UFC by comparing the degree of expectation and satisfaction of their basic language course students. For so, it was used an adaptation of the higher education quality assessment model called HEdPERF in the light of the five dimensions of quality (academic and non-academic aspects, reputation, program content and access). The research can be defined as a case study survey, with descriptive approach and structured questionnaires, adapted from the aforementioned model. For the results analyzes of were applied the classical statistical methods: exploratory data analysis and statistical inference, using the non-parametric hypothesis testing (Wilcoxon and Kruskal Wallis). The results show that in a general analysis, students of the Foreign Culture Houses have a satisfactory picture of the foreign language basic courses. And that the dimension which deals with academic aspects was the only one that got positive difference (greater satisfaction than the expectation) between the dimensions analyzed. The results of the comparative analysis between the CCEs pointed out that the German Culture House has, in most dimensions, higher degree of satisfaction to the level of expectation, which does not occur in the other houses.