At Princeton, as at many other institutions, students complete course evaluations at the end of every course. These course evaluations are administered centrally, but the instructor of record on a course can also add up to three individualized questions to their course evaluation.
In a review of the literature in 2014, Phillip Stark and Richard Freishtat concluded that student evaluations of teaching should not be used as the primary or only tool for measuring teaching effectiveness. They argue that student course ratings are valuable – if they include the right questions and have healthy response rates – and suggest that student evaluations be used in conjunction with other measures of teaching to form a holistic view of instructors’ teaching effectiveness.
Below we offer guidance on how to use student feedback, including end-of-semester course evaluations, to gather information on your own teaching.
Reflecting on Previous Teaching
Take a few moments to reflect on teaching successes and missed opportunities from the previous academic year and to use that reflection to plan for the coming term:
Gather Information from Students
You may choose to survey your students at the beginning of the course in order to better understand their academic preparation, motivation, concerns, and objectives for taking the course. The Pre-Course Survey or Questionnaire is an example of such a survey.
Whether your students excelled on mid-term assignments or fell short of your expectations, the time after mid-term can be challenging. Students may be complacent after doing well—or poorly—on mid-term work, and they may be distracted by looming end-of-term projects, independent work, or expected break plans. What can you as an instructor do to re-energize the class and help make the last few weeks of class more dynamic and productive?
Collecting informal feedback on your teaching or on activities conducted in the course can be a good way to check in on the progress of your students and make improvements where you see fit. To get feedback on student perceptions of your teaching, you might administer a mid-semester evaluation survey. This can be as open and general as asking the students: What’s working well for you in this course? What could be improved?
A mid-semester survey can also be more specific and focused, asking direct questions about specific aspects of the course, such as lectures or group projects and assignments. It is recommended that you select or craft a small number of thoughtful questions that will not require more than 5-10 minutes of your students’ time. (See a list of sample survey items.)
There are several tools available to you for gathering feedback from your students. You can use Google Forms, an online survey platform such as Qualtrics
(access provided by the university), or Canvas. It may be necessary to create your survey as “optional” for all students so that it remains anonymous and no identifying information is tracked.
Keep in mind that, at the mid-semester point, you will only be able to make reasonable changes to your course. It is important to keep this in mind when composing questions to ask students. You may wish to debrief with your students after you have collected and synthesized their feedback. Having an open and frank discussion about what you can and cannot change and how the course is going may be beneficial to you and your students in developing an understanding of teaching and learning in your course. This discussion may be especially valuable during virtual teaching.
Gauge Students' Progress
Midterm exams are a common and traditional method of formally assessing student learning. Reviewing results with careful focus on trends in student performance, both strengths and areas for improvement, can provide valuable feedback on teaching and help you fine-tune your plans for the remainder of the term.
You may wish to assess students’ learning through alternative, more informal, methods. Some suggestions include:
Try Something New
Your mid-term evaluation may lead you to want to try something new in your pedagogical approach. Sometimes the uniformity of our teaching format allows students to drift intellectually. If you usually lecture in class, try devoting time for students to discuss questions or problems in groups and share a few responses. Or pose provocative questions and poll student responses. (This can be done anonymously by means of personal responders, also called “clickers.” Contact the McGraw Center for the availability of a system to borrow.) If you normally use discussion, assign brief in-class writing or pair students up to analyze text or solve a problem. Help students think through challenging topics by forming, and then switching, sides in a debate.
These techniques allow you to connect with students and gain new insights into your teaching and their learning. Building on this information can add new energy to the last weeks of class.
Analyzing Final Exams
If your final exam is a traditional assessment with objectively scored (right/wrong) items, it is good practice to review student performance as well as test performance to guide your teaching. For example, ask yourself the following:
Having a greater understanding of where your students ended the term with regards to the course objectives and your expectations can help you refine your teaching approaches moving forward.
Reading and Interpreting Student Course Evaluation Responses
One way to assess our effectiveness as teachers from the student's point of view is through student evaluations. However, it is crucial to review these results with a few considerations:
Talking through your evaluations with a trusted colleague or a McGraw Center consultant can help offset the complex reactions sometimes set in motion by reading them. Keeping our perspective is a necessary first step to making practical use of evaluations. Rather than viewing student evaluations primarily as judgments of teaching performance, we may find it more meaningful to look at student reports as reflecting the spectrum of ways that students as novices learn and think within our disciplines.
Reflecting on the Semester
After you've submitted grades and before you start your summer research projects, you might consider taking a few moments to reflect on teaching successes and missed opportunities from this academic year and to use that reflection to plan for next year.
Berenson, Carol and Cheryl Jeffs. Making Sense of Student Feedback Guide. Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning Guide Series, University of Calgary, 2021.
Curby, Timothy, et al. “Sources of variance in end-of-course student evaluations.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 44-53. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1607249.
Marsh, Herbert W. and Lawrence A. Roche. “Making students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: The critical issues of validity, bias, and utility.” American Psychologist, vol. 52, no.11, 1997, pp. 1187–1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.52.11.1187
Signorini, Adriana, et al. “Students Helping Students Provide Valuable Feedback on Course Evaluations.” To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, vol. 39, no. 2, Fall 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.17063888.0039.204
Stark, Philp B. and Richard Freishtat. “An evaluation of course evaluations.” Science Open Research, 29 September 2014.