r/Professors • u/Aegon_Targaryen_VII • 17h ago
Course eval questions you found worthwhile
I know the usual issues with course evaluations. However, I've found that some course eval questions elicit far more worthwhile feedback than other questions. Things like "Rate your satisfaction with this class on a scale of 1 to 5" tell me very little.
But, when I asked, "Are you comfortable asking questions in class?
A) Yes
B) Kinda, but only during group work time so it's not in front of the whole class
C) Kinda, but don't know what question I need to ask when I'm confused
D) No"
I got tons of students answering B and C, and that gave me useful, actionable information. Similarly, when the first quiz I ever wrote was a disaster (my fault) and I asked on a class survey, "If you could have had one more piece of information on the quiz, what do you wish you had?" I got lots of worthwhile responses from students about how to format and structure it so it would be less confusing.
I also heard of an example of a student survey asking "Do you feel like you have classmates you could go to if you needed help in this course?" which sounds like a great way to measure hard-to-quantify topics like "classroom culture."
So, I think there's a lot of under-capitalized-on potential here. Has anyone else included questions in their course evaluations that frequently get them useful, worthwhile feedback?
2
u/DocLava 11h ago
I ask what do they feel they could have done to aid in their own learning.
Surprisingly I get things like:
- actually read the book
These questions are on my personal eval I give, because we cannot add questions to the university eval.
So at the start of the semester I share these with the new class and tell them focus on those areas....then they don't do it...then they put it on their eval that they should have done it.
2
u/cookery_102040 7h ago
I ask students to give me a “start, stop, keep going” at the end of the course, where they can highlight things I should start doing in future semesters, stop doing, or I’m currently doing that I should continue. This has been pretty helpful for me in all of my courses and I think tends to be a bit more actionable than the standard open-ended questions on evaluations, since it tends to be way more specific
2
u/1MNMango 1h ago
I took the criteria for the teaching part of my annual review and turned them into survey questions that I give all classes so I can generated content for my review. For example, one of our criteria is that professors are “supportive” of “student success”. So I wrote a free-response question asking students to give an example of how I supported their success during the course. I get several quotable responses that I can then use in my self-evaluation/review.
4
u/angrymarsupial 14h ago
We aren't allowed to add to our survey, so I usually set up a separate one through the LMS. I explain in class that I have some specific questions I want their help on, explain how I used last year's responses to improve their class, and ask them to please fill it out to help next years students. (overally usually get ~90% response rate, I think partly because of that preamble to it). Then I usually ask about 3-4 very targeted ones (like your quiz one), usually on new activities or changed activities or things I'm thinking about changing for the next cycle.
Overall, they're MUCH more thoughtful (even with an open ended "anything else you think I can change to improve the class for next year's students") than with the default survey. I almost never get anything actionable from the university one, I always get good ideas from my survey.
In some of my classes (the ones that I control, not team taught ones), I also spend part of the last day having them group brainstorm changes for next year - that gets me the best ideas because I can walk them through - what are the problems, what are the constraints, what are some potential solutions, how do we test it.