Linking transnational engineering students’ satisfactions with perceptions of education quality

The terms “satisfaction” and “perception” often cause confusion among researchers. Very often, customer satisfactions were studied by using survey instrument created for measuring customer perception. On the other hand, some researchers believed that customer satisfaction and perception were two different things, and hence separate measuring instrument had to be adopted for different purposes. This study aims to study how satisfaction is related to perception by using the survey instrument, SERVQUAL-TRAMS. The student satisfaction survey questionnaire was designed based on the literature extracted. The perceptions and satisfactions of students were surveyed through administering the questionnaires to 260 transnational engineering students. Linear regression analysis was then performed to identify whether there existed statistically positive relationship between perception and satisfaction data. The results revealed that there was no significant relationship between learning outcome and student satisfaction, but there was significant positive relationship between satisfaction and contributing factors which led to superior student learning experience.