Improving Your Teaching: Obtaining Feedback Adapted from Black (2000) Center for Research on Learning and Teaching Just as students benefit in their learning from receiving your comments on their papers and assignments, you may find it beneficial in improving your teaching to receive feedback from your students. The more information that you gather about your teaching the more you can make informed changes that will be beneficial both to your students and to you as you develop as a teacher. There are several sources of information that you can use: student feedback, self evaluation, peer observation, viewing a videotape of your teaching, and consultation with a staff member at CRLT or with someone from your department. Student Feedback Receiving student feedback in the middle of the semester can help you know what you are doing that facilitates the learning of the students and it will help make you aware of any difficulties they may be having with your instruction. Get written feedback. Self Reflection Peer Observation References
Gathering Feedback from Students | Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University Print Version The feedback students provide about your teaching on their end-of-semester course evaluations can be valuable in helping you improve and refine your teaching. Soliciting mid-semester student feedback has the additional benefit of allowing you to hear your students’ concerns while there is still time in the semester to make appropriate changes. In her book Tools for Teaching, Barbara Gross Davis offers a variety strategies for gathering feedback from students in a chapter called Fast Feedback. In-Class Feedback Forms Introduction One way of gathering feedback from your students is to take 15 minutes or so during class to have them anonymously complete a mid-semester feedback form. Method The following sample forms are available as PDF documents (for printing and copying as is) and as Word documents (for modifying or customizing). Form A: PDF / WordForm B: PDF / WordForm C: PDF / Word The following sample forms are available from the McGraw Center at Princeton University.
Schulich School of Business - Improving Teaching Using Student Feedback Is it really necessary to discuss the feedback with the students? Yes. If you’re not prepared to communicate and take action based on the feedback, don’t ask for it. How should I react if the student feedback is really "ugly" and very negative? Listen to and learn from negative feedback but don’t let it debilitate you. It is also useful to remember that many students are inexperienced in giving formal feedback. What should I do if the students suggest dropping a particular topic or class in their feedback? Start by probing whether the feedback suggests the topic is not worth discussing in class or whether students are suggesting it should be dropped from the course. If the students are suggesting that the topic should be dropped from the course, then make your own determination of whether you agree with that opinion. If you agree that a topic should be dropped from the course, your discretion in this regard may be limited on whether the course is core or elective.
Getting and Using Student Feedback | Learning & Teaching Student Experience of Learning and Teaching (SELT) SELTs are the form of student feedback most familiar to staff and students. They provide a regular indicator of student perspectives on learning and teaching practice. The University has recently introduced online SELT (eSELT) processes for the majority of courses, which means that SELTs are now centrally generated and conducted by Planning and Performance Reporting. Students are given the opportunity to provide feedback about their experience of each course in which they are enrolled. There are advantages and disadvantages to required student evaluations such as SELTs. Course Experience Questionnaire and the University Experience Survey The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is conducted by Graduate Careers Australia as part of the Australian Graduate Survey questionnaire, appearing alongside the Graduate Destination Survey. Other Student Feedback Staff may choose to conduct additional surveys and research with their students.
Methods for improving teaching using student feedback techniques 1The teacher’s purpose is to teach and the students’ is to learn, but teachers can learn from students how to teach better. In the United States virtually every postsecondary facility utilizes some method of faculty or course evaluation. The evaluation of teaching can come from many sources: (1) self evaluation, (2) peer-evaluation, (3) classroom research techniques, and (4) faculty and course evaluations. 2These techniques will be detailed, specific examples will be given, and an explanation will be included on how to develop a standard evaluation form. Although formal faculty/course evaluation forms are sometimes used by facilities in the United States for the purpose of making personnel decisions, this will not be the focus of this article. 3There are three major phases in curriculum design: 41. 52. 63. 7Once an educational program is established, how can the teaching effectiveness be analyzed? 8Why would teachers want to evaluate their teaching? Self-evaluation Peer evaluation
Using Student Feedback (NOTE: The below links will open in a new browser tab or window) Several years ago I bumped into a GTF who I knew to be a fine instructor at the UO Bookstore. She said that she had just received her course evaluations and that she needed to come see me about them. I asked, “how many didn’t love you this term?” She responded “about 3”. She had taught three sections and had worked with about ninety students. This isolated incident illustrates the inherent complications of dealing with student feedback. At the same time, gathering feedback from students can be a great way to get a glimpse into how they are experiencing a course—what is working and what is not working for them—and, thus, how to make the course better. Midterm Feedback Soliciting midterm feedback from students is helpful in several ways. The Survey feature of Canvas makes it easy to collect anonymous feedback from students, letting you know who submitted comments but not allowing you to connect them to specific students.
Student Evaluations | Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University Making Sense of Student Evaluation Feedback Adapted from “Some Guidelines and Principles to Consider In Making Sense of Evaluation Feedback” by Kathy Hoover-Dempsey, Associate Professor, Psychology & Human Development, Peabody College. Along with the fresh start of the new year, many instructors will receive an opportunity to assess their teaching skills when they receive student evaluations of their Fall courses. When considering student evaluations: Pick a good time to do so, when you will have enough time to digest at least some of the information, have privacy, and can give yourself some mental ‘space’ to analyze the information.Track quantitative results. When dealing with negative student feedback: When deciding how to further your development as a teacher: When planning steps to improve the feedback you receive in evaluations, consider the following options: Resources on Interpreting Student Evaluations Faculty Thoughts and Concerns about Student Ratings, by John C.
The Right Way to Use College Professor Ratings The freedom you experience as a college student can be a shock after coming from the high school structure you were used to. Finally being able to choose your own schedule, courses, and professors is a great thing, only if done strategically. Selecting the right classes depends on what courses you need to complete your general ed and major requirements. But another part of course selection process is to ensure you don’t get stuck with an instructor whose methods are the opposite of your learning style. So, how do you find out which college professors are the best? In the past, you’d have to hope you knew someone who can tell you about the professor. Here are a few of the most popular college professor rating sites, and a few tips on how best to use them, to pick the classes that are right for you. RateMyProfessors.com RateMyProfessors.com is the most well-known website dedicated to college professor ratings. Users can rate professors on clarity, helpfulness, and “easiness.” MyEdu.com UniYu
What If Students Could Fire Their Professors? : NPR Ed You're next. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption itoggle caption LA Johnson/NPR You're next. LA Johnson/NPR At Denny's, diners are asked to fill out comment cards. In universities around the world, semesters end with students filling out similar surveys about their experience in the class and the quality of the teacher. Student ratings are high-stakes. Recently, a number of faculty members have been publishing research showing that the comment-card approach may not be the best way to measure the central function of higher education. Philip Stark is the chairman of the statistics department at the University of California, Berkeley. Stark is the co-author of "An Evaluation of Course Evaluations," a new paper that explains some of the reasons why. For one thing, there's response rate. Then there's the problem of averaging the results. Finally, there's the simple fact that faculty interactions with students and the student experience in general vary widely across disciplines and types of class.
Student Evaluations: A Critical Review by Michael Huemer Informal student evaluations of faculty were started in the 1960's by enterprising college students.(1) Since then, their use has spread so that now they are administered in almost all American colleges and universities and are probably the main source of information used for evaluating faculty teaching performance.(2) There is an enormous literature on the subject of student evaluations of faculty (SEF).(3) The following is a summary of some developments in that literature that should be of special interest to faculty, with particular emphasis on criticisms of SEF that have emerged recently. But I begin with the arguments in favor of the use of SEF. 1. A test is said to be "reliable" if it tends to give the same result when repeated; this indicates that it must be measuring something. Most researchers agree (1) that SEF are highly reliable, in that students tend to agree with each other in their ratings of an instructor, and 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. G. 7. 8. 1. 2. 3. 4. 9. Notes