13 Feedback from students and course evaluations

As a part of effective pedagogical practice, instructors regularly look to learn from their students how their courses are working and to provide opportunities for students to communicate what is and is not working for them. An important skill that is part of teaching involves learning how and in what ways to listen to what students might be telling us about their experiences in our classes. Too, if you are interested in an academic career or might seek out additional teaching opportunities beyond the UW, course evaluations are a commonly-requested element of a job application, and within the department, the Writing Programs offer two teaching awards each year. We encourage you to not only engage with the UW evaluation system, but also to develop feedback mechanisms aligned with your pedagogical practice and which enable you to get additional perspectives on your teaching and students’ experiences.

Director’s Perspective on Student Evaluations in PWR

Student evaluations are a complex genre but still an important way for us to listen to and learn from what students have to share about their experiences in our courses. In PWR, we approach student evaluations as part of just one piece of a broader narrative about teaching.

Student evaluations are still a site of anxiety for me even though I’ve been teaching for more than twenty years and have seen scores of other people’s student evaluations and talked at length with teachers across many different kinds of experiences about how to navigate student evaluation feedback. I often have my own sense of how a class is going as a teacher and sometimes students surprise me when I am worried things may not be going well with positive feedback. More often, though, I experience student criticism of things that I may be particularly proud of or excited about, which can be hard–but nevertheless essential–for me to hear.

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned about student evaluations, in addition to the ways that they offer a chance for students to talk about what worked well and what didn’t and why, is for me to be able to paint a broader picture of how students respond to my teaching.

Some of the things students comment on are things I can respond to and address: a consistent pattern of students feeling like in-class time is busywork or students expressing confusion about the relationship between daily activities and larger projects/graded assignments are important messages for me to hear. I am still grateful to those students who have helped me learn ways of reinforcing and communicating the pedagogical goals embedded in daily activities and overarching course trajectories.

But other things students comment on I am not always able to change, or do not want to change: that a course is hard or challenging (when students might want for the course to be easier or less stressful), for instance, is not always something I want to change, but I always learn something about how I might communicate around the course’s challenges for students or how I might differently scaffold activities in an ever-enduring quest to design better assignments and sequences.

And sometimes students make comments that painfully remind me of biases in how they perceive me (how my voice sounds; that I mispronounce many words I have not heard spoken aloud; that I work with sign language interpreters in the classroom). I’ve lost count of the number of students over the years who have expressed surprise in course evaluation comments on how I communicate and/or that I am able to communicate.

As you order, administer, and respond to student evaluations in the coming weeks, please know that I and every member of the PWR administrative team are happy to talk at any time about ways to design the evaluation experience to better support students. I have been impressed with the evaluation approach at UW, which enables finer-grained attention to patterns in student responses, although we will still always need to contextualize student evaluations against a broader picture.

Guidelines for requesting student evaluations in PWR

At UW, student evaluations are not automatically conducted in courses; instructors must submit a request to IASystems to have online evaluations sent to students. Instructors can choose from a range of different forms that have different sets of questions that students respond to. This link offers a faculty user-guide for requesting online student evaluations, but below we have some PWR-specific guidance as well.

Evaluations take 24 hours to become available so please make sure to order them early. Please let me know if you have any questions.

While evaluations can reflect biases and must be taken with a grain of salt, they also offer valuable insights from students, including productive criticism and praise, that can inform your teaching.

Order your online evaluations at this link (note: you will need to log in with your NetID).

After you are logged in, you will see a screen asking you to select the current term. Select the current term and hit “Continue.” On the next screen, you’ll see a list of the courses you are teaching; select the courses in which you want to administer evaluations and hit “Continue.”

You’ll find a number of options you can select from in customizing your evaluations. All evaluations will be completed online. We no longer administer paper evaluations in PWR.

• Course Type: Select the modality in which your course was delivered: Face-to-Face, Hybrid, or Online
• Form Type: We typically choose the E form: for small classes in PWR but you are welcome to review the form questions here and choose the form you feel most appropriate.
• Open date and close date: We recommend opening around the last day of class and using part of your last class period to discuss the evals with students. If you express to students that you value and seek their feedback, they are more likely to respond. We suggest you reserve class time (10-15 minutes), inform students of the date, and ask them to bring technology. This increases the response rate. You might send one reminder email after class ends encouraging any remaining students to complete the evaluation.

Some further notes on online evaluations

• Student Experience: The system automatically provides all registered students with an email link to complete the evaluations (and emailed reminders to complete). Students require no special training for completing the evaluations. Each student has a unique link that can only be completed once. Feedback from students is that this is intuitive.
• Adding Questions (Yours and Ours): We ask that you consider adding some additional questions we’ve provided that will help you better assess your teaching. You are welcome to adjust or add a few of your own, as well. The questions can be found in the PWR Instructor Sourcebook (or, if you’re reading this in the Sourcebook, just below).
• Access Your Evaluations: You will be able to access all of your online evaluations at the following link in PDF form. We recommend downloading a personal copy of the PDFs for future use before you leave UW: https://uw.iasystem.org/faculty

Suggestions for Including Extra Questions on Your Evaluations

The Office of Evaluation and Assessment has always included several extra questions on the evaluations of EWP Faculty and TAs, but the system does not yet allow for programs and departments to customize evaluations. For this reason, we wanted to post a brief reminder on how to add these questions.

This link has step-by-step instructions on adding the questions

We strongly recommend that you add the following four questions:

1. The usefulness of the Instructor’s classroom discussion of student writing was:
2. The usefulness of the Instructor’s written comments on student papers was:
3. The usefulness (if applicable) of conferences with the Instructor was:
4. The usefulness (if applicable) of student response to your writing was:

Please note that these questions should be classified as a Comment Items, rather than Scaled Items, and be sure to click the Save button on the top right-hand side of the screen when you are finished!

Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges has also helpfully shared the following additional questions she’s created on her own evaluations and which you may find helpful or relevant to your own pedagogy/classroom:

Scaled

• Organization of course materials online was:

Open-ended

• Elements of the hybrid course format that supported my learning were:
• Elements of the hybrid course format that did not support my learning were:
• Evaluate the course’s support of group projects. Which aspects of the course design (video proposing intervention, group contract, in-class work time, conference with the instructor, self and group assessment) helped your group effectively work together?
• Comment on the effectiveness of the workshops led by staff from UW Learning Technologies and UW Libraries. Which workshops were most useful for you? Which were least useful and why? What workshops should be included in future versions of the course?
• How did the instructor’s use of classroom technology (if any) support or detract from your learning?
• How did the instructor’s use of the physical space of your classroom support or detract from your learning?
• If you chose to work in a group for the public service campaign project, why did you choose to do so? [Note: This question was for a 282 course where the first project was done in groups and students had the option to work in groups for the second]
• A general open-ended question type I frequently use asks about the usefulness of course readings for students’ learning. I list the readings to jog students’ memories.

Suggested Practice for Administering Student Evaluations in PWR Courses

Request the evaluations to open on the day that you plan to administer them in class (often this is the last day of class, but it can be another day depending on how you have planned your final few class meetings) and to close a few days after that class meeting. Alert students ahead of time about the scheduled evaluations, asking them not to complete the evaluations until they come to class.

On the day evaluations are being conducted, open class with some framing that explains why you are collecting student evaluations (see also suggested language above around unconscious bias and its effects on evaluations for women instructors, instructors of color, and women instructors of color). As part of the framing, review your course goals and how the course has been designed to reach them, naming specific pedagogical values and practices aimed at supporting student learning. This gives you an opportunity to reflect on the course and it prepares students to enter into a reflective mode and to connect with those specific parts of the course you most want to learn about and from their experiences with. This is also a good time to mention specific areas you would like feedback on–perhaps you want to understand which readings were most valuable for students and which ones they would suggest replacing, or which activities they learned the most from, or if a particular assignment/activity was successful for them.

At that point, ask students to go ahead and click on the link that they’ll have received in their email and leave the room and give students time to complete the evaluations. Ask one of your students to come find you when everyone has had a chance to complete their evaluation – bring something to read or think about while you wait. After that class period, follow up once or twice with a general reminder so that you can ensure any students who may not have been in class or who might not have had access to a computer or phone in class to encourage them to complete evaluations.