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Scholar as Teacher Tip Sheet Index
Interpreting
Student Evaluations
One way to assess our effectiveness as teachers
from the student's point of view is through student evaluations.
Yet student evaluations can be confusing at best and discouraging
at worst, especially given the effort that we put into our
teaching. Talking through your evaluations with a trusted
colleague or a McGraw Center consultant can help offset the
complex reactions sometimes set in motion by reading them.
Keeping our perspective is a necessary first step to making
practical use of evaluations. Rather than viewing student
evaluations primarily as judgments of teaching performance,
we may find it more meaningful to look at student reports
as reflecting the spectrum of ways that students as novices
learn and think within our disciplines. Below are some suggestions
to help you interpret your evaluations and use them most
effectively to inform your teaching and course planning.
Thinking through the numbers
Making sense of the comments
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Accepting the positive
and interpreting the negative with caution can
help you maintain balance in your view of the overall
tone of the comments. Because student evaluations
are anonymous, positive comments are usually genuine,
and you should not minimize their importance. Extremely
negative comments, on the other hand, can reflect
pressures students feel and their dissatisfaction
with a broad range of educational issues, over
and beyond your teaching, so don't overemphasize
them.
-
Organizing your student
comments can help you make sense of the variety
of responses. You may find it useful to read
responses from each separate question at the
same time; for example, reading all the comments
under “strengths
of the course” may help you see which aspect
of the teaching process students found most effective
(e.g., course structure, faculty/student interaction,
or feedback on written work). Likewise, are there
patterns that emerge when you read what students
listed as weaknesses of the course? If so, these
may be areas that you want to think about further.
-
Comparing
the organized written comments with the quantitative
feedback can help you differentiate between
idiosyncratic student responses and more
general learning issues. Do the written comments
help explain the overall ratings on particular
items? Are the comments consistent or variable?
Recurring comments may help you identify
a specific teaching/learning issue, whereas
comments that range from very positive to
very negative may reflect differences in
students' expectations of the course, their
backgrounds, or their intellectual development
or preferred learning styles.
Expanding
your sources of student feedback
-
Giving a mid-semester
evaluation and responding to student suggestions
at that time can help you identify issues early
enough to make productive changes and communicate
your course goals more clearly. These evaluations
are used only by the instructor and may be designed
as open-ended responses or rated items. (See the
McGraw Center web site, www.princeton.edu/mcgraw,
for some examples.)
- Gathering more information
about the meaning of your evaluations after the
course is over may provide you with significant
insights. You may ask a group of students to
get together with you at the beginning of the next
semester and elaborate on some of the suggestions
or concerns raised on the evaluation. To encourage
students to speak more freely, you may ask a
McGraw Center consultant to conduct such a focus
group.<\p>
For additional information on gleaning useful information from your evaluations,
please contact the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning
at 609-258-2575 or mcgraw@princeton.edu.
Resources:
“Using Student Evaluations to Improve Teaching", Speaking
of Teaching:
Stanford University Newsletter
of Teaching, 9:1 (Fall
1997). http://ctl.stanford.edu/teach/speak/stfall97.pdf.
“Interpreting and Using Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness.” Center
for Support of
Teaching and
Learning, Syracuse University. http://cstl.syr.edu/cstl/T-Lint-stdrate.htm.
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