AY 300 - Fall 2009: Mid-semester Evaluations

Course evaluations are an important part of your teaching – you may believe that you're teaching well, but you'll never actually know unless you ask your students. While there is a department-wide, official evaluation that all of our courses give out at the end of the semester, by then it's too late to fix things for your current students. This is why we ask that you solicit student feedback around the middle of the semester as well as at its end. This allows you to adjust your section and teaching style as necessary to match your current students' demands.

You should, of course, take your students' responses with a grain of salt. What they want is not always the same thing as what they need. But, that being said, you should seriously consider all the information you get from your evaluations and decide how it should affect your teaching.

Mid-semester evaluations should be given about halfway through the semester. Try to avoid giving them right before or after an exam – this usually skews your results! The halfway point of the Fall 2008 semester is one week from today. Try to give your evaluation in the middle of section, maybe right after your initial lecture review or Q&A session. It's tempting to give your evaluation during the last 10 minutes of section, but you get less thorough responses this way since many students will rush through it in order to leave early.

You should step out of the room while your students are filling in the evaluation or at least turn your back to the class. When the allotted time is up, have one of your students collect all of the evaluations and put them in an envelope. Do not open the envelope until much later – i.e. after you've left Evans and there are no students around you at all.

Your evaluations should be anonymous. However, you might want to ask your students to give their section number so you can compare your multiple sections.

Give your students way more than enough room to write. You don't want them to limit responses simply because of a lack of space. You might even consider printing the evals one-sided and make a note at the beginning saying that if students need more room to write that they should feel free to use the back of the page.

Here's a ranked list of general topics that might be found on an evaluation. The last three are much less important to cover, since you have much less control over them. The very last point in particular is almost never worth putting on a section evaluation.

Section structure

lecture review, Q&A, worksheets, demos, group work, etc.

GSI's skills

board skills, student interaction skills, nunchuck skills, lecture skills, etc.

Section content

which topics are covered and how long is spent on each

Stuff besides section or lecture

i.e. star parties you're at, your TALC, office hours, etc.

Course content

which topics are covered and how long is spent on each

Course structure

order of topics, demos during lecture, audience participation during lecture, grading, etc.

Instructor's skills

board skills, student interaction skills, lecture skills, etc.

There are a few common types of questions that appear on course evaluations:

• Open-ended. These are good because they allow students to discuss the things they feel most strongly about. You can't know what your students will have the strongest opinions on when you write your eval, and an evaluation that asks about every possible topic will be too long. Examples:
  1. Describe three things you like about this section.
  2. What does your GSI need to do less of in section?
  3. Put any additional comments here.
• Short answer. Very directed or short answer questions are good for students who don't want to (or can't) write a lot. You can also ask for a quantification of your students' feelings on a topic. Examples:
  1. On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being great, 1 being horrible) rank the following …
  2. Give the section a letter grade.
  3. Circle MORE, LESS, or THE SAME for the amount of time (relative to the semester so far) we should spend on each item.
• Humorous, but still informative. These questions make the eval less tedious and can sometimes provide unexpectedly helpful perspective. Example:
  1. Draw a face that best describes how you feel about this class.
• Humorous, just for fun. These can also be fun, but don't go overboard. Example:
  1. Make up a hilarious nickname for your GSI.

Humorous and/or totally random questions are good in moderation – they can break up the seriousness of the evaluation and show off your personality. But it's annoying to have to spend much longer filling out a form just because your GSI thinks she or he is a comedian.

You should probably use a variety of types of questions and ask for purely qualitative and semi-quantitative responses. Always include at least one very open-ended “Any other comments?” question. You should think about your directed questions to make sure they have a purpose. For instance, if you solicit a one-to-five ranking of a particular skill and get all ones, are you actually going to be able to change something in response to that feedback?

Once you've given and collected all of your evaluations, you need to actually look at them. It's a good idea to read through all of your evaluations twice: once to just read every answer and the second time to see if you can spot some trends and consistencies. If a majority of students agrees on something, then it might actually be a valid point or an accurate assessment.

Your students will be disappointed (but, likely, not surprised) if they spend time filling out evaluations and nothing changes as a result of their comments. It's crucial to close the feedback loop with your students – during the section after you give your evaluations, you should summarize the responses you got and say what you'll be changing as a result. This is arguably the most important part of having evaluations.

If you see a lot of comments about a topic that you are unwilling or unable to change, acknowledge the comments and explain why they won't be catered to. For instance, it's common to have very mixed reactions to group work in sections. You could acknowledge those who are dissatisfied with it, but point out that others enjoy it and that you're required to structure your sections around group work. If you can come up with a few small changes to mollify the complainers, that always helps.

We will ask you to compile a short summary report that includes:

1. consistent comments
2. averages/standard deviations/histograms for any quantitative questions
3. any hilarious, unfairly mean, or really thoughtful comments
4. a personal assessment of what you've learned and what you'll change (and when)

In addition to turning it in to us for this class, the summary report could be sent to the Head GSI and/or instructor, if they are interested in reading your evals. Most instructors, however, do not request reports or copies or even require that you pass out midsemester evaluations. Different instructors have different opinions of students responses on the evals: some ignore them completely and assume that the students have no idea what's best for them, some ignore them because they teach the way they teach and that's that and it won't change, and some actually read through them (or at least read their GSIs' summaries of the evals).

There are sample evaluations in the EBRB, under the “Evaluations” section. The evaluations used in this course are linked to from the various Astronomy 300 wiki pages as well. Note, however, that the Astro 300 eval is a little bit on the long side; we do this purposely since Ay 300 is a fairly amorphous class and should be tailored to what its students are interested in.

Chapter Nine of Slater & Adams discusses evaluations and may be a useful resource.