Use Early Semester Feedback to Engage Your Students

It’s that time of the semester again … you’ve built some rapport with your students, and everyone is settling into a routine. It’s time to start thinking about how you engage your students, and about what’s happening in the classroom that helps them learn effectively.

As we do each semester, the Center for Teaching and Learning is offering our Early Semester Feedback program to help you gather that information. The program gives your students a way to provide you with confidential and anonymous feedback on how the course is organized, whether the students see connections between the assignments and the course's goals and objectives, how students respond to your teaching style and to the resources you provide, and other attributes of the course.

Once you’ve registered and told us which courses you’d like feedback to survey, staff from the CTL will set up the survey and send you a link to distribute to your students. When your students complete the survey, we 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 your students, helping them understand the rationale behind your design of the course.

Some guidelines:

1. Introduce the idea of the survey to your students in advance. Tell your students that you want to learn their perspective on the course so that you can improve their experience and help them learn. If students know their responses matter, they are more likely to complete the survey.
2. Consider student responses carefully. Look at the positive responses, to see what you are doing well, and look at the suggestions for improvement. You can usually group these suggestions into several categories:
   1. ideas you can implement this semester (e.g., returning homework assignments more quickly);
   2. ideas you would have to implement in a subsequent semester (e.g., changing the grading structure of the course); and
   3. ideas that you will not change for pedagogical reasons (e.g., the number of exams).
3. Respond promptly to student feedback and thank them for their input. Critical to the success of this process is that you circle back to the students. Summarize what you learned, so students have a sense of what their peers said, also. Plan on sharing 3-5 items with the class. Tell students what you will change in response to their suggestions. If there are other aspects of the course that you will change in a subsequent semester, tell the students why those things have to wait. If students requested something that just isn't feasible, explain why the structure you have developed is important to helping them learn.
4. Keep your tone positive. Thank the students for their comments and suggestions. Make it clear that you respect their role in making the course work, and invite them to be your partner in improving the course.

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 their effect. 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).

Give it a try! Sign up no later than Friday, September 28, 2018 and we'll get your survey ready to go the following week.

Once you’ve closed the loop with your students, be sure to tell us about how it worked as part of Operation Engage!

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.