Midterm Evaluations

You may have seen Jess’ email this morning inviting all faculty to have their students participate in a midterm evaluation.  This idea might be new to some of you, or you aren’t sure how or why these evaluations can be beneficial.  This article is for you!  Also, we’d love to see you at our lunch-time session at noon on Wednesday to talk about this more! Feel free to sign up here.

Benefits

Conducting a midterm evaluation has a lot of positive impacts on students and on faculty, including:

• Empowering students to take ownership of their own educational experience
• Allowing faculty to make changes mid-semester to increase student satisfaction and change the direction of the course.  This is particularly important in a semester like Fall 2020 when we are trying so new things like Canvas, and online synchronous classes.
• Improving SRIs at the end of the semester

Collecting Responses

When you ask students for feedback, it is always helpful to collect anonymous data and responses open-ended questions.  Closed-ended questions are helpful, but open-ended questions allow room for students to express themselves.

As you evaluate your responses, here are some tips on how to identify themes:

• Throw out off the wall, or useless comments.  Statements like “best class ever!” or “worst class ever!” aren’t helpful in making improvements to your course.
• Identify themes in the responses.  If you are seeing the same comments (positive and negative) in your class, then you know that these things are among the most important to address.
• Identify things you can change, and things you can’t change. If students say that they would prefer to meet face-to-face than in a synchronous session, you can’t change that, and you’ll respond differently to those items than to suggestions you can change.
• Work on clarifying your intentions.  Often you’ll get comments about something you feel you are already doing in your class- this is a great space to communicate your intentions to your students, and to consider ways that we can make our work more visible to students.

Reporting Outcomes

Just conducting a midterm evaluation is important, but a next step that is essential to the success of midterm evaluations is to report back to students what you found.  This helps students to feel heard, and like their voices are valued in your class.  Even if you can’t change the things they have requested, you can mention them, and empathize.

For example, you might say “I heard from your midterm evaluations that you are struggling with the group project.  Here are some ways I can make that easier for you… However, one of the goals of our program is to foster engagement among students, and in this class we’ve been asked to have a group project, and I can’t change that to an individual assignment.  I am going to spend some additional time clarifying how you can work together to make that assignment successful.”

Be clear with students about your realistic goals for making changes.  Even if you can’t make a change to an assignment or a textbook, you can let students know that their voices are being heard and that you value their feedback.  You should also acknowledge the things that you are doing well, and let students know that you heard those positives and that you intend to continue doing them, or building on that positive foundation.

Making Changes

Where possible, implement changes in your course, and let students know that you are making those changes as a result of their feedback.  This lets students know that you are listening, and that changes are being made intentionally.  Feedback on the midterm evaluation should also help you identify what is going well in the course, and you can continue those practices that students find helpful and build on them- you are doing great things, and your midterm evaluation should highlight those positives along with the negatives, and help you to move forward in a positive way.

I hope you’ll try out a midterm evaluation this semester- they are often positive, constructive conversations between faculty and students that make a practical difference to the tone of the course.  Please feel free to reach out to Becky if you have questions or want specific help in implementing a midterm evaluation.

Resources

Thanks to Jess Retrum for some of these resources:

• Making Student Feedback Work
• Mid-Semester Feedback from Students

And one more I really liked:

• Benefits of Early Course Evaluations