Article: Reflective Teaching

The Use of Collaborative Midterm Student Evaluations to Provide Actionable Results

Journal of Marketing Education

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0273475315619652

Lynn’s Recommendation

Get inspired by this approach to collective feedback: when students work together providing feedback rather than doing it individually, you can get a clarified view of what's going on in your class, and the transparency helps students build empathy for each other's [sometimes disparate] experiences.

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.