Category: Evaluating our Teaching


Archive for the ‘Evaluating our Teaching’ Category

Nov 16 2011

Understanding and Eliciting Feedback on Course Evaluations

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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)

 

Mar 09 2011

Eliciting Feedback on Teaching

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We give students extensive feedback about their writing during the semester. How can we elicit constructive feedback from students about our teaching?

The Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning offers:

  • Midterm student focus groups
  • Classroom observations
  • Videotaped analysis

The College Writing Program offers:

  • Classroom observations
  • One-on-one and small-group conversations about teaching writing
  • Support for classroom visit partnerships

Faculty can:

  • Give students extra prompts to complete with the Student Evaluation of Teaching forms. (Responses can be collected with the forms.)
  • Ask a colleague to administer the evaluations and to frame the evaluations with a request for constructive feedback.
  • Conduct Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects focused on learning more about specific aspects of teaching/student learning.
  • Collaborate with students on Student Voices projects.