Posts Tagged ‘course evaluations’
November 2 - Getting Immediate Student Feedback the Plus/Delta Way
By: Susan Codone, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Professors teach in a vacuum; we enter the classroom, deliver our lessons, and leave, and rarely get any feedback on the quality of our instruction before the end of the semester when formal faculty evaluations are completed by students. Other than grades on tests and other assessments, we really don’t know for sure if students are learning what we are teaching, and we often don’t have a good handle on whether our instruction is working.
September 12 - Boost Your Student Ratings by Creating Evidence of Student Learning
By: Mary Bart in Teaching and Learning
Student ratings can provide helpful and legitimate feedback. Unfortunately, all too often, students give very little time or thought to end-of-course evaluations, or they use them as an opportunity to make mean-spirited comments about the instructor. And, all things being equal, an instructor who teaches a challenging course will score lower than an instructor whose course is less rigorous.
May 19 - Student Rating Forms and Definitions of Good Teaching
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
The close of the academic year brings with it the end of courses and the usual student ratings of those courses. Among many concerns related to this activity are those pertaining to the presence of certain items on the form. They ask irrelevant questions, given what and how we teach. Of course, that doesn’t seem to prevent students from offering evaluations in those areas.
December 3 - End-of-Course Ratings: Lessons from Faculty Who Improved
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Faculty Evaluation
Two researchers used end-of-course ratings data to generate a cohort of faculty whose ratings in the same course had significantly improved over a three-year period. They defined significant improvement as a 1.5-point increase on an 8-point scale. In this cohort, more than 50 percent of faculty had improved between 1.5 and 1.99 points, another 40 percent between 2.0 and 2.99 points, and the rest even more.
January 22 - Course and Instructor Evaluations: Misconceptions and Realities
By: Patti Shank, PhD, CPT in Faculty Evaluation
If evaluation sounds good in theory but feels bad in practice, it may be that you or others are operating under some common misconceptions.
January 7 - Two Ways to Make Student Feedback More Valuable
By: Rob Kelly in Faculty Evaluation
Unless they have a real problem with how the course was run, most students fill out end-of-course evaluations so quickly there’s often very little valuable information in them. Here are two ways that Wayne Hall, psychology professor at San Jacinto College in Texas, elicits helpful feedback on his courses:
July 22 - Strategies for Preventing and Correcting Poor Faculty Evaluations
By: Mary Bart in Online Education
Online instructors receive poor evaluations for any number of reasons, including lack of experience, inadequate training, and poor communication skills. Other times, the poor reviews are more reflective of the course design than the instructor who’s teaching the course. That distinction is unimportant to the students.
June 18 - Students Question Value of End-of-Course Evaluations
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning, Teaching Professor Blog
We’ve visited this topic before: the quality of feedback students provide on those end-of-course ratings. Many students fail to take the evaluation process seriously because, unless they plan on taking another course with that professor, the feedback will provide little benefit to them even if, by chance, the professor decides to act on it.
April 6 - Building Student Engagement in Online Courses
By: Mary Bart in Distance Learning Administration, Online Education
Despite all the high-tech communication technologies available to online instructors today — discussion boards, email, IM, wikis, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, etc. — every once in awhile Dr. B. Jean Mandernach likes to use a tool that was invented way back in 1876. The telephone.
February 25 - How to Make Course Evaluations More Valuable
By: Robert T. Brill, PhD. in Effective Teaching Strategies, Faculty Evaluation
The major benefit any conscientious professor seeks in course evaluations is in gaining useful student feedback. Yet most rating instruments generate vague, unjustified student comments. Quantitative scales provide ambiguous statistics for such generic instructional areas as preparation, fairness in grading, etc., but they don’t include any formative commentary. Open-ended questions ask students what things the
