Collecting Midterm Feedback from Students

This concise resource can get you started thinking about early term feedback: when to do it and how.

Although students provide summative insight on our teaching in their end-of-semester course evaluations, teachers can also benefit from soliciting mid-semester feedback from their students. Unlike the feedback on formal course evaluations, this mid-semester feedback can be utilized immediately to make adjustments, clarify expectations, or reinforce the goals and aims of the course. This both ensures that your course is more dynamically responsive to your students’ needs and provides a safe, low-stakes forum for students to provide feedback that will not appear on your official teaching evaluation forms.

Giving feedback is a skill, and in this video collection you can see how students at UC-Merced leveraged peer-to-peer connection to explain the importance of actionable feedback for their course evaluation process.

This research introduces and evaluates a novel form of midterm student evaluation of teaching: the online collaborative evaluation.

At McMaster University, midterm student feedback is called a ‘Course Refinement’ and includes consultation with educational developers. As part of a multiphase study investigating teachers’ perceptions of the Course Refinement process and its impact, this analysis presents effective attributes of the process as an adaptation of Chickering and Gamson’s well-known ‘seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education’, as our findings align with their work.

For UVA instructors, the CTE offers a variety of confidential consultations about teaching. Use this link to sign up for consultations, including "Engaging Student Perspectives," a mid-semester feedback opportunity in which a CTE consultant will conduct focus groups with your students.