Abstract
Evaluation of quality in higher education: Content validity. The new conception of higher education in Spanish society and in its national, regional and local governments has generated laws that give more independence to universities. Because of this situation, governments need information about how universities use that independence. This context has stressed the need of defining the construct of quality in higher education and the difficulty that implementing an appropriate evaluation procedure entails. This paper has two aims: first, to justify that systems of indicators are a plausible alternative to both problems, and second, to study the content validity of a group of indicators chosen from the literature. We have carried out the following process in the empirical study: we selected some indicators related to higher education (about teaching, research, and services); we consulted experts about the congruence of these indicators, and finally we used the Osterlind's index (1989) to operationalize the consensus between experts about their judgments. We describe the quality indicators obtained in this analysis as a possible alternative to study quality in higher education.
