Collect Early-Semester Feedback From Your Students

Collecting feedback a few weeks into your course is a great way to see how things are going and demonstrates to your students that you care about their concerns and ideas. Each semester Center for Teaching and Learning offers a service we call Early Semester Feedback, to help you learn what’s working well for your students and what can be improved.

One advantage of this approach over the standard end of semester course evaluations is that early semester feedback occurs early enough in the semester that you can make changes in the course right away and see the effects of the changes. Students respond positively when their comments result in changes to the course, leading to improved student attitudes about the class and/or instructor in the end of semester evaluations (Keutzer, 1993; Overall and Marsh, 1979).

If you are interested, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2xXPLov for the early semester feedback program by Wednesday, October 11th, 2017. After signing up, a member of the CTL staff will set up the survey.

After your students complete the survey, CTL staff will help you interpret the survey results and decide how to best respond to your students’ needs. Sometimes your response might include making a change to an aspect of the course. Sometimes your response might be a conversation with the students in which you explain the rationale you used in designing the course, and how they might engage better with it.

All feedback is confidential, anonymous, and provides a way to assess and be responsive to students’ needs while the semester is in progress.

DIY Option

If you prefer to gather the feedback on your own, one simple strategy you can use is called “Start-Stop-Continue”. It takes about 15 minutes of class time.

Ask the students to take out a piece of paper (or you can use Poll Everywhere) and have them answer three questions. Stress the anonymity of the process and that you are only interested in understanding how things are going and whether you should consider making any changes.

What can we start doing to improve your learning in this class?
Is there anything we should stop doing that is making it difficult for you to learn in this class?
What should we continue doing that is helping you to learn in this class?

Framing the questions around their learning helps keep students focused when responding.

Collect and process the students’ responses (organizing them into a table or spreadsheet can be helpful). During the next class period, take some time at the beginning to discuss the results with your students. Topics might include:

Suggestions from students you are willing to act on and how you intend to do so;
Suggestions from students that you are not willing to act on and why; and
Any contradictory responses (e.g., some students say the textbook is helpful, others say that it is not). Ask more probing questions to get clarification on these discrepancies.

Collecting this feedback benefits both you and your students because it helps you to identify problem issues while you are teaching the class, rather than after the class is over (which is often the case with more formal end of semester evaluations). It also helps build good will with your students and shows them that you value their opinions and ideas.

One important caveat is that if you collect early-semester feedback, you must respond to students’ input. Asking for their feedback and then not processing it in a meaningful way may alienate students and potentially damage any rapport you’ve built with them throughout the semester. I’ve found that if you engage in this process earnestly with students, they generate really insightful, helpful suggestions for improving the course.

Resources:

Keutzer, C. S. (1993). Midterm evaluation of teaching provides helpful feedback to instructors. Teaching Psychology, 20(4), 238–240.
Overall, J. U., & Marsh, H. W. (1979). Midterm feedback from student: Its relationship to instructional improvement and students’ cognitive and affective outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(6), 856–865.

To follow up on any of these ideas, please contact me at fglazer@nyit.edu. This Weekly Teaching Note was adapted from a contribution to the Teaching and Learning Writing Consortium hosted by Western Kentucky University.

Contributor:

Kristi J. Verbeke, Ph.D.
Interim Executive Director, Teaching and Learning Collaborative
Wake Forest University