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Over the last decade, the assessment of university teaching quality has assumed a prominent role in the university system with the main purpose of improving the quality of courses offered to students. As a result of this process, a host of studies on the evaluation of university teaching was devoted to the Italian system, covering different topics and considering case studies and methodological issues. Based upon this debate, the contribution aims to present an integrated strategy of analysis which combines both descriptive and model-based methods for the treatment of student evaluation of teaching data. More specifically, the joint use of item response theory and multilevel models allows, on the one hand, to compare courses’ ranking based on different indicators and, on the other hand, to define a model-based approach for building up indicators of overall students’ satisfaction, while adjusting for their characteristics and differences in the compositional variables across courses. The usefulness and the relative merits of the proposed procedure are discussed within a real data set

In this paper, we study the mobility choices of Italian students in their transition from a bachelor’s to a master’s degree level with an added emphasis on their overall mobility pathways. We consider individual data from the Italian National Student Archive on two cohorts of students who were enrolled in the academic years 2011–2012 and 2014–2015. We followed both cohorts in Italian universities for six academic years. This allowed us to depict five different profiles of students, categorise them as stayers vs. movers, and work at two different levels. Logit models were then adopted to study the probability to be in mobility at a master’s level, given that a student had been a stayer at bachelor’s degree, and to assess the effect of the field of study. Apart from individual characteristics, network centrality measures were encompassed in the model to assess the university attractiveness in influencing mobility choices.

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