The End-Of-Semester Evaluation

Why assess your teaching? The students do that for you at the end of the semester, and your colleagues probably will use that information to judge your tenure. Most student evaluations have to do with whether the students liked the class and little to do with whether they learned anything.

• Find out whether the evaluation your department uses is set in stone. It may not be and you may have some ability to change the questions to provide you with more information. Almost all evaluations have a space for students to make comments. Ask the students to specifically comment on the things you really want to know about: Did they find that the on-line reading quizzes made them more prepared for class? Did they find your Powerpoint slides to be helpful or not? (and why?)
• If your department evaluation is set in stone, there's no rule that you can't give your own evaluation in addition to the departmental one. If the results come out well, you can include the evaluation and the results in your tenure portfolio along with the departmental results.

Formative Evaluations

Why wait until the end of the semester to get student feedback? It's much better to get feedback when there's a chance to actually do something about it.

• About two or three weeks into the semester, give your students a short survey about the basics of the class. Ask them if you are going too fast, or too slow. Ask them if they have trouble downloading the reading material from the web, or completing the on-line quizzes. Use a scale of 1-5 and make sure you make it clear to the students which is the high number. Most of the time, you'll find that the majority of the students think everything is just about right. It is useful to show the students the results of the quizz in terms of averages. This will help the students who think you are going too fast to see that most of the other students don't share their opinion. If you find that most of the students do think you're going too fast, there's an opportunity for you to reconsider your pace. The only danger there is that if you show the class that 90% of the students think you're going too fast and then you continue at the same pace, the students are going to feel that you've ignored their input.
• One-minute papers often are used to determine what the students learned or didn't learn in class. Instead of asking them about content, ask them to write their most favorite and least favorite things about the class one in awhile. You may find that you are standing in front of the projector and blocking parts of the transparencies, but that nobody wants to say anything during class.
• In large classes, consider asking for a few (3-4) volunteers as class representatives. Let the class know that if they have concerns, they can talk to these students. Meet with the students two or three times over the course of the semester. (Buy them pizza or coffee or something else to thank them.) This allows students who don't want to say anything to you to communicate without feeling that they are liable to have their grade lowered. Students with minor complaints generally won't take the time to seek out the class representatives, but students with real concerns will.

Other Ideas

• Ask a colleague (another new faculty member, or a truster senior faculty member) to observe your class and give you an opinion of your teaching. If you're using, for example, active learning, try to get someone who is familiar with the technique so that the discussion doesn't center on the validity of the technique, but rather on your implementation of it.
• Most learning centers will have an evaluator come and observe or videotape your class, then give you feedback.