It’s that time of the semester again (or will be shortly): the moment when we ask our students to tell us what we do well or at least what they think we do well. What I’ve found is that students don’t always seem to have a sense of exactly what these evaluations are for. After all, it’s not like they get to see the evaluations of professors whose courses that they are taking. (Or do they?)
But we know that getting evaluations done by students can be really useful. After all, it’s going to make up a portion of your tenure file. Or if you’re like me and you’re not in a tenure-track position, your evaluations can be an important part of your dossier as you’re hunting for a room of your own. All job-related reasons aside, evaluations are the best place for us to get feedback from our students/customers about what we’ve designed for a semester’s work. It certainly is nice to know whether our intricately planned assignments and reading list was coherent and interesting. What this means is that it’s in our best interest as educators to get the most participation from students in completing their evaluations. So how does one do this?
Here’s a couple of tips that I’ve put into place over the last year that have radically improved my yield on evaluations.
- I ask my students to do the evaluations at the beginning of class. When I was an undergrad, most of my professors did them at the end of a class period. This put the students in the position of only having a scantron between them and freedom. If you give them that option, they won’t spend much time since you don’t matter to them as much as leaving class. (Sorry to break it to you.) On the other hand, if you start class with evaluations, they are working against their own self-interest. Either option is potentially painful: being taught or filling out an evaluation. You force them to choose, and inevitably I’ve found that they choose to do a good job with the evaluations. (I’m aware of course that this is a proleptic evaluation of my teaching.)
- In addition to the scantron, I distribute an open-ended evaluation. But instead of using my department’s generic one, I write my own. This gives me a chance to write questions (normally 5-7) that are specific to my teaching and our class. I frequently ask about texts that I should and shouldn’t teach again, about assignments, and about my teaching style.
How do you hack your (students’ participation on) evaluations?
[Image by Flickr user cocoen. Used under Creative Commons license.]
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4 Responses to Getting the Most out of Your Evaluations
Hillary Jones - November 16, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I always lead a discussion prior to having students complete their evaluations. We work through the syllabus, day by day, and I ask them for what worked, what didn’t work, what can be improved, and any ideas they have. I get very specific responses, and this method lets me get to work on updating my lesson plans immediately. It also prepares them to give specific, detailed written feedback after they spend the time discussing the course using a lot of detail.
Janice - November 16, 2009 at 10:56 pm
I like to distribute my own evaluation which focuses on the course materials, organization, structure and topics. I ask them to all give me one thing they’d really like to change/add/retain if the course is offered again and so forth. These evaluations are very helpful to me unlike the standard university forms.
I hadn’t thought of starting the course meeting with the evaluation form but that could be a good innovation to try!
Derek Bruff - November 18, 2009 at 8:38 am
I always make a pitch to the students about how seriously I take the evaluations, particularly the responses to the open-ended questions. I suspect that most students are unclear who reads course evaluations and what consequences they might have. I like to explain that kind of thing (e.g. my department chair and dean will potentially read these) and then emphasize that I personally take their comments to heart and make changes to future courses based on their feedback.
Also, I think it helps if you conduct some kind of mid-semester evaluation and respond to the issues it raises. That conveys to the students that you are listening and value their contributions. Of course, it’s too late now to do that!
We have online course evaluations, so students complete them out of class. I find that students will write more when evaluations are online, but fewer students complete them. That’s disappointing, since I want to hear from all of my students (and since those all-important rating averages have less meaning with lower response rates). I’ve known colleagues who scheduled a class session in a computer lab in order to have students complete the evaluations during class. I’m strongly considering something like that this semester.
William Patrick Wend - November 19, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I am having my classes finish the last normally scheduled day so we can spend the final exam period discussing the class. Grades will be in already, so I am going to ask students to be honest with me about what they think of the class, my performance, what they liked/hated, etc. We did this when I was an undergrad often and I always loved it as a student.