Until he read feedback from his students a few weeks ago, Edward J. O’Connell had no idea that he sometimes talks too fast in the honors-college leadership class he teaches. The Stony Brook University assistant clinical professor also didn’t know how eager his students were for hands-on activities that would help them practice the skills they had been learning.
Like a growing number of academics, Mr. O’Connell asks students to evaluate his teaching midcourse rather than waiting for feedback at the end of the term. That means he can make adjustments, which can bolster student learning and also satisfaction.
In response to the midcourse evaluations, Mr. O’Connell, who teaches environmental safety and health, said he would tell his students they should interject in class and ask him to slow down. He also said he would figure out ways to incorporate hands-on activities in the class.
More and more professors are using midterm student evaluations, experts say, and more and more colleges are strongly urging their faculty to collect student feedback midway through their courses. Stony Brook this year put in place a universitywide online system for collecting midcourse feedback. Professors and students are not required to use it, but university officials are hoping that both groups will see its benefits and use it to improve classrooms. Other universities that have recently adopted campuswide systems for soliciting midterm feedback from students include Grand Valley State University and Western Washington University.
Growing use of midcourse feedback comes amid debate over how much emphasis colleges, departments, and instructors should place on student evaluations completed at the end of terms, and to what extent the information should be used to measure the quality of instructors. A professor’s end-of-course student evaluations are often used in performance reviews and weighed in decisions about faculty promotion and tenure. At Texas A&M University, for example, anonymous end-of-semester student evaluations are used as a basis for awarding professors cash bonuses of up to $10,000.
Critics of giving end-of-semester student evaluations significant weight in measuring faculty performance say that the feedback is unscientific, that students as customers are not always right, and that increasing incentives for faculty to win over students could inadvertently lead to grade inflation.
A reason why more professors and colleges are asking students to comment on courses earlier in the term is that doing so enables faculty members to improve, increasing their chances of receiving better evaluations by the end of the course. If some instructors know that their teaching is weak, and that it could work against them, they will take steps, like early feedback, to make their teaching better, said Barbara Gross Davis, author of Tools for Teaching, a book that describes strategies for soliciting early student feedback.
The heightened interest in accountability in higher education also may be fueling more-frequent solicitation of student feedback, she said. “The current emphasis on assessment and student-learning outcomes may be a contributor in helping to create a culture of self-reflection and improvement,” Ms. Davis said.
Freedom to Be Frank
Because midcourse evaluations carry lower stakes than those at the end of a course, faculty members can use them often to ask tougher questions. Sometimes, Ms. Davis said, end-of-semester questionnaires do not ask the right kinds of questions for giving professors the information they need to improve their teaching. Professors who use midcourse evaluations say they believe they get more-honest feedback from students in the middle of the term than they get at the end, in part because the professors can use midcourse evaluations to ask directed and open-ended questions.
At Stony Brook, the online form the university provides for midsemester evaluations includes two open-ended questions: What does the instructor do particularly well? And, what could the instructor do better?
Faculty members can add extra questions if they want more information from their students, who are automatically notified by e-mail that the online feedback form is available for each of their professors.
Graham Glynn, assistant provost and executive director of the Teaching, Learning + Technology center at Stony Brook, said the online questionnaire is designed to help professors seek honest assessments of their performance in the classroom.
“The university made it a policy that the data collected in the early semester would only be given to the instructor because we wanted them to be willing to take the risk to ask difficult questions, without fear of it affecting their annual raise or their promotion and tenure,” Mr. Glynn said.
Student participation is voluntary. In Mr. O’Connell’s class, about one-third of his 20 students filled out the online form, he said. Mr. O’Connell said his students told him they got bored answering the same two questions for all their courses.
Mr. Glynn said he didn’t expect a high response rate this semester, the first time the midcourse feedback form was made available universitywide. But he expects more students to participate once both students and instructors grasp the purpose and promise of the midterm feedback and start seeing its benefits.
The practice of seeking midterm student feedback online is increasingly being adopted by universities nationwide, according to Larry Piegza, president of SmartEvals.com, a company that provides online evaluation services. He said his company, which has 100 colleges as customers, started offering the midterm-feedback service in 2005, after colleges began requesting it.
Focus-Group Feedback
At some universities, faculty-development centers offer professors the option of getting midterm feedback through focus groups. The centers send a staff member who is trained to conduct focus groups into the classroom, where he or she separates students into small groups and asks them about the instructor’s strengths and weaknesses.
When Marsha Huber, an associate professor of accounting, recently taught at Otterbein University, she wanted a focus group to solicit midterm feedback from her students because she needed help understanding comments her students made about her class.
One consistent critique her students made in their evaluations at the end of the semester confused her. “In their feedback they kept writing, ‘The professor is unorganized,’ ” said Ms. Huber, who is now a professor at Youngstown State. “I said, ‘What does that mean? I have a syllabus, I have a schedule.’ It was a mystery to me.”
After a focus group was held to provide a critique of her class, the professional who led the discussion told Ms. Huber that her students wanted her to use PowerPoint presentations instead of writing her notes on the board. She decided to start using the PowerPoint presentations included with the class textbook.
After a couple of weeks, however, her students told her that those presentations were boring. She again adjusted her approach, converting her own notes to a PowerPoint format, and her students seemed satisfied.
“It wasn’t something that was a big adjustment, and it was something to help me also, so I made the change,” Ms. Huber said. “I didn’t get that complaint again.”
Ms. Huber said that using a focus group is her favorite way of acquiring midterm feedback because it is done by a person who is professionally trained. Feedback from students isn’t as reliable or useful when it’s solicited by people who might use it to measure a professor’s performance, she said.
“It shouldn’t be done,” she said, “by someone who has the authority to hire, fire, and evaluate the instructor.”
Using Student Feedback
At some institutions, individual professors have been using midcourse evaluations for a number of years and their colleges have developed methods for helping faculty members interpret the feedback they receive.
Mary C. James, associate dean and co-facilitator of the Center for Intercultural Learning and Teaching at Heritage University, has worked for almost seven years helping faculty members obtain midterm feedback. Faculty members at Heritage University can use the midcourse feedback form that the center provides or create their own questions.
Center facilitators can assist instructors in interpreting students’ answers.
It is important to pay attention to the patterns, Ms. James said. If many students keep suggesting the same change, or say that they can’t understand the same section of the textbook, then the professor should probably focus on reviewing that issue with the class.
“If you see many students answering, ‘I just don’t understand the iceberg metaphor for intercultural communication,’ then you should go back over that idea in class,” Ms. James said.
But it is also important to pay attention to comments that aren’t part of a theme, since instructors could privately help students who have individual concerns.
Even when professors can’t make changes that students suggest, talking about it lets students know that they are being heard, Ms. James said.
“Sometimes students ask for less writing but it feels like there can’t be less writing. Then you can talk about what’s the reason for each writing assignment and any strategies for getting help so that the writing isn’t so difficult,” said Ms. James, who also is an assistant professor of English. “Letting them know that you are listening helps you build a stronger relationship with your students.”
At Otterbein University, Ms. Huber had a student who indicated in his midterm feedback that he was very unhappy with her class. He said he couldn’t learn the subject and made a negative comment about her teaching. She didn’t think it was coincidental that the student had just gotten a D on a test.
Ms. Huber asked her student if he wanted to met with her during office hours.
“When he came to my office we talked about his expectations of others versus his expectations of himself,” she said.
She said she helped him understand that learning is a joint responsibility between an instructor and the students in a class. After their conversation, the student began improving his grades and finished the class with an A.
“More than once I have been able to change a student’s negative comment into a powerful relationship,” Ms. Huber said. “In his final reflection he wrote: ‘Thanks for letting me see things in a different way.’ That was very rewarding to me.”
