Were you unable to attend last week’s workshop on early semester evaluations? It’s not too late to start thinking about early semester evaluations. This is a great way to get feedback from your students to help you improve your teaching, and it shows that you are invested in their learning.
One of the most popular forms of early semester evaluation is the Teacher Designed Feedback Form. This form contains questions that you design about specific strategies, methods, and activities in your class — these questions can be either open-ended or Likert style. These can be administered in class or electronically outside of class.
Here is an example of an early semester evaluation I gave in the Applied Math Methods course that I taught last fall. I had made a few changes to the course, and this gave me the opportunity to get student feedback on how these aspects of the course were going. It also gave me an idea on how the course was going overall.
Things to consider when reading the early semester evaluation results:
- Look for general trends in the responses. Disregard extreme outliers (both positive and negative)
- Discuss the results with your students. Address the general trends that you observed, and let your students know of any changes that will be made as a result of the feedback. If you choose not to make changes that were suggested, use this time to explain why.
Check out the workshop page for more information related to early semester evaluations.
