Food for Thought A

Originally uploaded by Iguana Jo.

I recently co-facilitated a focus group of about 10 learners – with Jeff Friedrich from the AMS. Our intention was to learn something about:

• what motivates students to participate in course evaluations?
• what kind of results would students like to see made public and how would they use that information?
• what are the most important outcomes in the process – from their perspective

Here’s a brief summary of what we learned:

• Learners are motivated when instructors demonstrate that they care about the feedback they receive. This is most evident when instructors use mid-course evaluation to guage reaction to the course and instructional approaches. Learners like it when instructors say how they will use the feedback to improve teaching and dedicate some time to discuss evaluation – makes it more meaningful to them.
• Not all data needs to be made public but learners want to see information about the instructional approaches, grading practices, etc. in order to make decisions about which courses to take. Learners use sites like Rate My Professor, not because they think the info is reliable but because they have no alternative (perhaps slightly more objective) sources .
• Learners want to know that their feedback changes something (hopefully improving the course) – for the instructor, for themselves, if possible and for their peers.

The comments from these students reinforce some of the findings in a 2003 US based research study (sample size of 208) on the topic of student motivation and perception in student evaluation of teaching.

So, what to do?
Richard Felder of North Carolina State University thinks that open ended questions may be the way to go if your goal is to both identify teaching “problems” and do something about them.
Others have cautionary advice about seeking out and using mid-course feedback from learners.

Either way, it would be useful to know about your experience with mid course student feedback. Do you collect it from your distance cohorts? If not, what are the barriers as you see them?

Please post to the comments section if you would like to share your thoughts on this.

Posted: 02|12|07 at 5:11 pm. Filed under: Policy & Practice.
Comment | Trackback