Mid-Semester Feedback

You don’t have to wait until the end of the semester to ask your students about their course experiences. Mid-semester feedback is a way for you to learn about student experiences in your course, and your teaching methods and strategies that influence your student learning, make changes to your course and support student learning.

To learn more, read the Weekly Teaching Note: Mid-Semester Feedback Improves Teaching and Learning. When you sign up, you will have the opportunity to add up to three custom questions to the survey.

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

What are the benefits?

Mid-semester feedback can help you manage your classroom and enhance student learning. The survey can help you understand what is working well and what might be improved. One advantage of this approach over the standard end-of-semester course evaluations is that mid-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).

How does it work?

You can sign up for mid-semester feedback here. After signing up, CTL staff will set up the survey and email your students directly, inviting them to complete it. Students may receive 1–2 reminder emails if they do not complete the survey within one week of the initial email invitation. To improve the response rate, you may provide a day and time so an email reminder is scheduled for your students when they meet for your class so you can allow a few minutes at the end of class for them to respond.

After your students complete the survey, CTL staff will help you interpret the 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.