Posts Tagged ‘student 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.
June 28 - Measuring Learning: The Ultimate Teaching Evaluation
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Do you ever wonder what’s more important – educating your students or producing satisfied customers? When student ratings are the sole measurement of teaching assessment, many faculty start to wonder. This seminar will give you strategies for evaluating teacher effectiveness based on what really counts: student learning.
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 - Online Course Quality Assurance: Using Evaluations and Surveys to Improve Online Teaching and Learning
By: Mary Bart in Free Reports, Online Education
In order to improve online programs, courses, and instruction, you have to first determine your goals, select metrics that will tell you what we want to know, analyze these metrics for clues about needed changes, and then make those changes. It may sound simple, but it isn’t.
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.
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 11 - Voucher Points Help Build Student Engagement
By: Melvin Billik in Effective Teaching Strategies
I happened on the idea of giving voucher points accidentally, but over the years they’ve proven quite valuable in promoting active student involvement. It started when I was still teaching math in high school, and a student came up with a particularly clever method of solving a mathematics problem. As a reward, I wrote him an IOU good for one point on any of my tests. A few months later it happened again, and then later on I gave out a third voucher point. That semester, I received very positive comments about the practice on my student evaluations. Students requested that I “do voucher points more often.”
June 10 - Faculty Evaluations: Those Hurtful Student Comments
By: Glenn Hartz, PhD in Teaching Careers
At most places now, students are given the opportunity to evaluate instructors at the end of each class. Along with standardized items, students are invited to offer open-ended narrative comments on the course and instructor. Sometimes the comments are nice; sometimes negative but constructive; sometimes negative and destructive.
October 5 - The Wizard of Oz: A Metaphor for Teaching Excellence
By: Donna Bowles in Effective Teaching Strategies, Philosophy of Teaching
When reflecting on my experiences as a college professor, several themes from The Wizard of Oz often surface. This well-known story provides a metaphorical view of behaviors that I strive to achieve in my ongoing work with students. In the familiar foursome’s journey to the Emerald City, I see characteristics necessary for teaching excellence—the need to improve, fine-tune and revamp as we travel with students through courses and curricula.
