Do your writing assignment focus on the product or the process? How about your students? Where do you think their focus is?
At the end of the day, our students aren’t going to take from our courses the products they developed and use them in the
Many faculty dread that end-of-semester email informing them that student evaluation feedback is available for viewing. Even instructors who routinely excel on numerical ratings find themselves struggling with students’ responses to open-ended questions, where inevitably one remark stands out in its harsh tone or offensive
Oh, how the tables do turn! Each semester, after quizzing, testing, and otherwise grading our students, they get to return the favor and rate their professors, and some of them can be harsher than we are on our most critical days. Because administrators incorporate these
I recently spent a rainy afternoon watching the semi-finals of the Madrid Open and noticed how often one of the players looked to his coaching box for reassurance about his strategy. Coaches are not just for players trying to make it into the big leagues;
The peer review processes for promotion and tenure and for continuing appointment provide committees with what’s needed to make overall judgments about the quality of instruction. For teachers, however, peer reviews usually don’t contain the diagnostic, descriptive feedback they need to continue their growth and
Research work exploring faculty–student relationships continues, and it provides deeper insights than course evaluation into the role of these relationships in promoting learning. All the work up to this point, in one way or another, confirms how important teacher–student relationships are. Sadly, it also attests
Using end-of-course evaluation results to improve a course isn’t always easy. Generally, the results are delivered after the fact. The course is over. The students are gone. That rules out any chance of making adjustments during the course, and it rules out clarifying any confusing
Student evaluations can be used to improve teaching, and here’s an excellent resource to inform those efforts. Author Guy Boysen writes, “The purpose of this teacher-ready review is to provide a comprehensive, empirically-based guide for the use of student evaluations to improve teaching” (p. 273).
Since course evaluations started being collected online, response rates have plummeted. In one study they ranged from 23 percent to 47 percent with the mean at 33 percent, compared with a range of 33 percent to 75 percent with a mean of 56 percent for
We regularly get course evaluation results, and they aren’t the kind of feedback most of us want. At least, that’s what the results of a recent survey showed. Questionnaire responses from almost 350 biology faculty members representing 185 different institutions found that 41 percent were
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