Making Sense and Use of Student Evaluations
While evaluations are neither perfect nor a holistic measure of teaching effectiveness, there’s still important information that can be gleaned from them. They can give you valuable insight into your course(s) to ultimately help improve your teaching—but first, you must filter out the noise.
Strategies for reading evaluations vary considerably. One strategy involves going through all the student responses in one sitting and then rereading them a week or so later, allowing you time to process the feedback and see the comments more objectively. It can be hard to overcome those few negative, and often contradictory comments—one student said they loved the course, while another hated it. Try not to focus on overly critical comments. Instead, home in on the trends; that is where opportunities for improvement can be found.