Understanding and Eliciting Feedback on Course Evaluations

Telling students what you learned from their feedback is essential to ensure that students put a good effort into the evaluation process. Be sure to tell students that you want candid and constructive responses. Explain that the purpose of the form is to help you improve.

Resources about understanding students’ perceptions of learning:

Clayson, Dennis E. “Student Evaluations of Teaching: Are They Related to What Students Learn? A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature.” Journal of Marketing Education 31.1 (2009): 16-30: “Students seem to associate rigor with negative instructor characteristics that override positive learning relationships….Students’ satisfaction with, or perception of, learning is related to the evaluations they give” (26).

Clayson, Dennis E., and Debra A. Haley. “Are Students Telling Us the Truth? A Critical Look at the Student Evaluation of Teaching.” Marketing Education Review 21.2 (Summer 2011): 101-12: “Even if a small percentage of students give inaccurate or dishonest evaluations, the resultant [evaluation] cannot be taken at face value. The evaluations must be interpreted in light of other evidence. An administrator utilizing the evaluations may learn something about students’ opinions, perceptions, and attitudes towards instructors, but learn much less about the instructors’ actual performance” (108).

Smith, Calvin. “Building Effectiveness in Teaching through Targeted Evaluation and Response: Connecting Evaluation to Teaching Improvement in Higher Education.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 33.5 (Oct. 2008): 517-33: “One of the greatest potential benefits [of connecting evaluations to teaching improvement] is the possibility of increasing students’ perceptions that evaluation activities have, are, and will be used to enhance the teachers’ practices and the course design; these are the two outcomes of evaluation that students value most” (530)

Tags: evaluating our teaching, evaluation, student perceptions