Welcome to Teaching, a newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week Dan describes one reader’s intriguing idea to improve course evaluations, Beckie shares how some of you make use of brain research in your teaching, and we look at the month ahead.
The Benefit of Hindsight
The collection of student course evaluations typically follows a familiar timeline: On the last day of class, the instructor distributes evaluations for students to fill out, on paper or online. On its face, such timing seems to make sense — even if some students might be exhausted at the end of the semester, it’s also when the course is fresh in their minds. And, ideally, they’re just starting to make sense of their experience. But would it make more sense to wait?
Raghuveer Parthasarathy, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon, thinks so. “It’s great to hear from students long after a course ends who report that a class had an impact on them,” he wrote on his blog. Sometimes, he hears from students who have gone on to graduate school. But others are people he just happens to run into on the streets of Eugene. “My favorite,” he wrote, “was a cashier at a local natural foods store, who happily commented on topics from my ‘Physics of Life’ course, despite it being two or three years in the past, and despite getting a D in it.”
Parthasarathy, whose course I happened to observe a few years ago for this story on science literacy, contacted us to see if we’d heard of institutions that conducted evaluations well after the course has ended, perhaps even a year later. We hadn’t — at least not in the way he envisioned. But we’ve heard versions of this argument: that the true measure of education is difficult to gauge right away. Its benefits — the habits of mind and ways of seeing the world, for example — tend to take a long time to bear fruit. This kind of thinking underscores the approach of the Gallup/Purdue Index, which surveys alumni. Some research, like this study, has used student performance in subsequent courses to evaluate teaching quality.
The passage of time might have some advantages, Parthasarathy said in an email. An evaluation conducted a year later might reveal how well a course prepared the student for later courses or for life, he wrote. With the benefit of hindsight, students could say whether the course spurred them to explore things they hadn’t planned to, or whether particular aspects of the course, good or bad, stuck in their minds.
These sorts of questions are especially important in disciplines like his, where preparation for future courses is especially important, he wrote, and “there’s little context for a student to evaluate this at the end of a term.”
What do you think? Would it be valuable to follow up with your students a year after they took your course? And if so, what would you ask? Alternatively, if you’re like Parthasarathy and you’ve run into former students long after your course, what’s the most consequential thing you learned from the encounter?
Please email me at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, and I might include your response in a future issue of the newsletter.
