Gathering early-semester or mid-semester student feedback allows instructors to gauge what is working well in the course and determine what adjustments might need to be made. There are several reasons for incorporating early-semester feedback into your course design and plan:
- The information can be used to make changes during the current course.
- Students feel empowered to help design their own educational process.
- It allows an assessment of specific behaviors rather than a global “quality of teaching” rating.
- Instructors can ask for the information most pertinent to them-even soliciting criticism-without fearing any adverse consequences from the administration.
- The evaluations go directly to the instructor, not the administration, precluding comparisons across instructors (Keutzer, 1993)
Once the early-semester or mid-semester evaluations are distributed and the responses are collected, it’s important to have a plan for evaluating the responses. When analyzing the feedback from student evaluations, keep the following tips in mind:
- Throw out the off-the-wall comments that do not provide you with useful information and forget about them.
- Throw out the positive comments that don’t tell you anything specific.
- Divide the negative comments into two groups: those you can change and those that you cannot change.
- Work on perceptions and learn to be explicit.
- Prepare students for doing course evaluations throughout the semester.
- Savor the comments that are meant to be negative, but let you know you are doing your job (Buskist and Hogan, 2010).
For more information on creating an early-semester evaluation or to see examples of early-semester evaluations, please contact the Kaneb Center For Teaching and Learning at kaneb@nd.edu.
References
1. Connie Buskist and Jan Hogan, (2010). She Needs a Haircut and a New Pair of Shoes: Handling Those Pesky Course Evaluations. Journal of Effective Teaching 10 (1), 51-56.
2. Carolin Keutzer, (1993). Midterm Evaluation of Teaching Provides Helpful Feedback to Instructors. Teaching of Psychology 20 (4), 238-240.
