If you’ve been frustrated by vague or limited feedback, use these suggestions to get better quality student comments that are more actionable.

• Frame questions about the course or your teaching around what is helping students learn rather than what they like or dislike (e.g. they may dislike frequent homework but it’s helping them learn the course content).
• When asking students to complete the survey, emphasize that you value their feedback and will use it to make changes to the course.
• Encourage students to give you specific feedback. Offer an example. (e.g. “It’s helpful if you can be specific. If you’re finding the in-class activities helpful, tell me why. Is it discussing the concepts with your peers? The difficulty of the questions? The similarity between the activities and the homework?”)

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.

The Students Assessing Teaching and Learning (SATAL) program is a resource available to support academic programs and/or course level assessment for instructors, chairs, and deans. The SATAL program, sponsored by the Center for Engaged Teaching and Learning at UC Merced, offers trained undergraduates to gather information about the student learning experience on behalf of individual instructors or academic programs. For example, in support of program assessment, SATAL students can conduct exit interviews with graduating seniors or focus group interviews with students at key transition points in a curriculum. Results are then summarized in a professional report.

Midterm student evaluations have been shown to be beneficial for providing formative feedback for course improvement. With the purpose of improving instruction in marketing courses, this research introduces and evaluates a novel form of midterm student evaluation of teaching: the online collaborative evaluation. Working in small teams, students comment on their course using an online collaborative document creation tool. Compared with a standard individual evaluation, the online collaborative evaluation was rated significantly higher by students in enjoyment, ease, and ability to provide useful feedback. In addition, comments yielded from the collaborative evaluation provided formative information that could be used to improve student learning. In a marketing class that emphasizes teamwork, the collaborative evaluation of teaching can reinforce the benefits of functioning well as a team, while providing useful information to the instructor to improve the course.

Midterm student feedback is a common process in post-secondary institutions that can lead to enhanced teaching practices and thereby potentially to higher ratings of instructional skills in summative course evaluations. 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. To our knowledge, this marks the first educational development adaptation of the ‘seven principles’.