Making Sense of Your Course Evaluations
Leader
Cody Kirkpatrick, Indiana University-Bloomington
Student evaluations of teaching remain one of the most used – and misused – components of our teaching portfolios. These evaluations are often given substantial weight by administrators in promotion and merit reviews, even with their numerous known biases. As long as student evaluations remain one of the factors that exert influence on our careers, how to use their data to our advantage in demonstrating teaching effectiveness remains needed.
The workshop is intended for any faculty member or graduate student who receives student evaluation feedback on their teaching. Attendees are encouraged to bring a set of student evaluations from one of their recent courses to reflect on and work with – but no pressure, you will not be expected to share with other attendees if you do not wish to do so.
Goals
In this workshop, attendees will explore how to:
- Interpret quantitative evaluation feedback
- Extract useful insights from open-ended student comments
- Describe effective ways to use student evaluation in your teaching portfolio
- Begin developing your plan to use student evaluation feedback to improve their classroom
Reminder to attendees: at no time will you be asked to share any of your own evaluation data with attendees, if you don't wish to do so (we will provide example data to work with if you prefer that).
Program
1:30 Welcome and introductions; what we'll do; the importance of student voices in our teaching
1:50 Identifying things to work on in our teaching
2:20 Reflecting on qualitative student evaluation feedback
2:40 Break
2:50 Reflecting on numerical feedback
3:10 Work time for you: planning a course of action
3:30 Sharing and brainstorming
3:50 Workshop evaluation and reflection
4:00 Adjourn
Resources
Workshop slides and handouts
- Our workshop slides (link to Google Slides)
- Suggested methods for collecting student feedback (outside the formal end-of-course evaluation; link to PDF)
(If you have suggestions or requests for below, please share and I'll add them here)
Literature on the usefulness of course evaluations
- Course Feedback as a Measure of Teaching Effectiveness (white paper from Stanford University)
- Holman and Colleagues (2019). Evidence of Bias in Standard Evaluations of Teaching (Google Doc with over 100 references)
Best practices for documenting your teaching
- Knapper, C., & Wright, W. A. (2001). Using portfolios to document good teaching: Premises, purposes, practices. New directions for teaching and learning, 88, 19-29.
- Seldin, P., Miller, J. E., & Seldin, C. A. (2010). The teaching portfolio: A practical guide to improved performance and promotion/tenure decisions. John Wiley & Sons.