Student Evaluations of Teaching

I deeply value student feedback on my teaching practice. Over the years, student feedback has helped me identify my signature strengths, such as enthusiasm and deep care for students and their learning (which students have linked to their willingness and ability to learn challenging material). While I grow and change as a human and a teacher, such consistent messaging from students has helped me discern what classroom practices might align well with who I am at my best, and so help me bring out the best in students.

Student feedback has also challenged me to look critically at where my courses and classroom practices might benefit from change. Suggestions for improvement, especially when framed as straight-up negative feedback, are never fun to receive. I do my best to approach them humbly and strategically, searching for relatively common concerns I can actually address (while keeping an eye out for rare issues too). I then try to address these concerns as best I can, and examine evidence of impact in subsequent years’ feedback.

What follows is a summary of my Student Experience of Instruction scores, with links to blog entries discussing qualitative results and forthcoming priorities for change. This page builds from my previous page, Teaching Evaluations, which offers analysis from 2008-2009 through 2020-2021 academic years.

Measurement

Students are asked to rate agreement with six “University Module Item” (UMI) questions on a 5 point scale, 5= strongly agree, 4 = agree, 3 = neutral, 2 = disagree, 1 = strongly disagree. Since W2021, these items have been phrased as follows:

  • UMI 1. Throughout the term, the instructor explained course requirements so it was clear to me what I was expected to learn.
  • UMI 2. The instructor conducted this course in such a way that I was motivated to learn.
  • UMI 3. The presented the course material in a way that I could understand.
  • UMI 4. Considering the type of class (e.g., large lecture, seminar, studio), the instructor provided useful feedback that helped me understand how my learning progressed during this course.
  • UMI 5. The instructor showed genuine interest in supporting my learning throughout this course.
  • UMI 6. Overall, I learned a great deal from this instructor.

We are provided with the following aggregate data for these items: response rate, frequency distribution, interpolated median, percent favourable, and dispersion index. For details, please see Metrics | Student Experience of Instruction. There are 12 additional items, but for brevity I focus only on the UMIs.

Open-ended questions are as follows: Do you have any suggestions for what the instructor could have done differently to further support your learning? Please identify what you consider to be the strengths of this course. Please provide suggestions on how this course might be improved? Please add any comments or feedback that will help your instructor to improve this course. *Please explain in a few sentences why you wish to nominate your instructor for a teaching award. *This last question was added by the Psychology Department and, I believe, only appears for students who indicated they wish to nominate the instructor.

Across these questions, I tend to receive about 6-8 pages of text responses (in size 8.5 font) per section of course I teach, so about 12-16 pages per course per year. Students are unidentifiable, and it is impossible to follow one student’s train of thought (i.e., if they say “see earlier answer” I cannot know which answer it is referring to).

PSYC_V 217 Research Methods

Since 2010 I have regularly taught students in this course at 9am and 10am on MWF in Term 1. This graph presents UMI interpolated medians starting from W2021, when we were back in person classes but masking. I didn’t teach in W2022, and when I returned for W2023 I felt compelled to overhaul this longstanding course (see my post STLHE 2024 for some rationale, and Courses for all syllabi). Since the course renewal, quantitative results suggest a slight drop* in some items, but not to unacceptable levels (in my opinion). Stay tuned for qualitative analyses, which paint a much richer picture of what’s been going on. Hint: it is related to my talk at Improving University Teaching Conference 2025.

Bar graph showing UMI interpolated medians of all six PSYC 217 sections taught since 2021.

*Note that 2021/22 was an unusual year: we were all relieved (also anxious) to be back in class after a year of learning fully online. As a result, those numbers may have been unusually high. Unfortunately, the item wording changed in 2021, so we can’t compare with PSYC 217 SET W2018-W2020 to figure this out.

PSYC_V 218 Analysis of Behavioural Data

Coming soon!