Use Student Feedback to Ensure Care, Trust and Persistence
When teachers encounter student feedback only in the form of high-stakes, end-of-semester course evaluations, the very idea of feedback can provoke anxiety. In fact, some teachers may find the process so intimidating that they don’t read course evaluations and avoid seeking input from students. This vicious cycle can harm teachers’ relationship with students and ultimately represents a missed opportunity for growth and development.
This article offers guidance for seeking student feedback to support students’ persistence and your development as a teacher.
Different Types of Feedback
It is important to recognize that feedback can take different forms and serve different purposes. When you ask students to tell you about their experience during a course, you are collecting formative feedback, i.e., feedback that you can use right away to make adjustments and improve students’ learning.
Formative feedback is an opportunity for you to learn and grow as a teacher, and it is separate from administrative evaluations of teaching. You, the teacher, are the primary driver of and audience for students’ formative feedback, and you don’t have to share this feedback with anyone outside your course. You may choose to ask students for small amounts of formative feedback at multiple points during a course so you can assess and possibly reconsider your teaching decisions.
Summative or evaluative feedback is different from formative feedback in several ways. While end-of-term student evaluations of teaching, like the SIRF (Student Instructional Rating Form), are designed in part to improve teaching quality, they are more frequently used to evaluate teaching quality for administrative purposes. In fact, the evaluative purpose of this tool is evident in its name: the SIRF is a rating instrument.
Summative feedback like the SIRF is collected by others and based on externally-created criteria, and its primary audience is external as well. Moreover, instead of being collected at multiple points over a course, summative feedback is an evaluation at a single point in time, a kind of snapshot of how students are thinking about their experience of a course near or at its conclusion.
The Role of Formative Feedback
Research suggests that formative feedback from students can play an important role in teaching improvement (Sozer et al., 2019; Flodén, 2017; Veeck et al., 2016). Seeking formative feedback provides an opportunity for you to involve students in a structured conversation - a conversation for which you set the terms - about their learning in your course.
Initiating this kind of conversation can help build trust between you and your students by showing them that you care about their learning: this is a key element of student persistence (Buskirk-Cohen & Plants, 2019; Soria & Stebleton, 2012). In addition, creating opportunities to hear from students during a course, while you can still make adjustments, lets you find out what may be troubling or confusing them so you can respond to those concerns before summative feedback is collected at the end of the semester. The very fact that you solicit students’ input can ensure better outcomes on end-of-term evaluations (Young et al., 2018).
The formative process is most effective if you take a deliberate, thoughtful approach to ensure that you are receiving useful information. Below are suggestions for planning to collect feedback, managing the process of collecting feedback, and interpreting and using the feedback you receive to best effect.
Planning to Collect Formative Feedback from Students
Examine your mindset
Remember that the goal of formative feedback is to inform your growth, not to judge your value or worth as a teacher.
When we fall into the belief that teaching ability is innate rather than learned, it’s easy to see negative feedback as evidence of failure. However, when you recognize that teaching is a set of skills that develop and improve over time, you can see that feedback is a useful and valuable part of that development.
Before you collect feedback from students, remind yourself that this is a learning experience for you and an important step in your professional growth.
Identify what really matters to you
Before you seek formative feedback from students, take some time to reflect on what you want to learn from the process. Do your own assessment of your course by asking yourself some basic questions like these:
- What do I think is going well in the course so far?
- What has been challenging (for me or for my students) in the course so far?
- What are the things I would like to do differently to improve students’ learning in the course?
Strategies for Collecting Formative Feedback
Show students that you value their feedback
Students are more likely to respond to requests for feedback and share useful information when they know that what they have to say matters to you.
Make sure you explain to students why you are collecting their feedback, how you will use it, and how you will share your response to it. But don’t just tell students that their feedback matters - show them the importance of their participation in the way you structure the process.
One way to show students that their feedback matters is to seek their feedback early enough to respond and make adjustments. For example, you may want to collect feedback in the first two or three weeks of the semester to find out how students are making sense of the structure of the course.
Alternately, you may choose to collect feedback after the first assessment or assignment so that you can learn about students’ experience of that assignment. If you wait until too late in the course (e.g., after the midterm) to collect feedback, students may be resentful because they realize that their input won’t have a meaningful effect.
If you are teaching a class with in-person or synchronous online meetings, it is important to set aside class time for students to share their feedback. This can be done on paper, but if you are using an electronic survey, invite students to use their mobile devices to respond in class. Not only will you get a higher response rate than you would by simply posting a link to a survey, but you will also find that you receive more substantive feedback (Young et al., 2018).
Be purposeful in what you ask students
It’s important to focus students’ attention not on what they “like” or “don’t like”, but instead on the specific parts of the course that are helping (or hindering) their learning.
CATLOE has designed several different early semester surveys that are appropriate for a variety of teaching contexts. These surveys provide feedback on several key dimensions of teaching and are informed by the research on effective teaching and human learning. However, these aren’t the only way to collect students’ feedback, and they may be used in conjunction with other strategies. For example, you may want to identify key moments in a course where you ask students for small amounts of qualitative feedback about their learning, including specific assignments or activities they have completed in the course.
Strategies for Responding to Formative Feedback
Have a plan for reviewing and analyzing feedback
While formative feedback isn’t designed to be a judgment of you as a teacher, even experienced teachers may feel uncomfortable when reviewing students’ responses.
If you think that you may struggle to review feedback in an objective or helpful way, don’t do it alone: seek confidential support from a CATLOE consultant or a trusted colleague.
Look for patterns and trends in the feedback you receive
When reviewing any kind of feedback, it’s easy to get distracted by negative responses or comments and fail to see the bigger picture.
Think about the feedback you receive as a data set: consider what the set as a whole tells you rather than focusing on the discrete pieces of data.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore outliers altogether, but consider them in the larger context. Instead of trying to respond to every individual suggestion, think about where you see themes arising.
For example, if many students say that they are having trouble navigating the course in Brightspace or that they are struggling to manage the workload of the course, those are issues for you to consider very carefully and respond to.
Share feedback with students
Share feedback with students and respond to their suggestions in a structured way. It’s important to close the loop with students by sharing some of your analysis with them, and it’s ideal to spend just a few (5-10) minutes of class time on this.
You don’t need to share every detail of the feedback you received, but it’s helpful to share some big ideas that emerged and to explain any changes you plan to make as a result. Here is some language you can use to structure this communication:
- Many of you think these things are going well and are helping you learn in the course: (list 3 or 4 things here)
- Some of you seemed concerned about: (list only 1 or 2 things here). I want to remind you why this is so important for your learning in this class. Here’s what I can do to help you navigate this more effectively…
- Here are some common suggestions that emerged: (list only 2 or 3). Here’s how I plan to act on those suggestions:
References
- Buskirk-Cohen, A., & Plants, A. (2019). Caring about success: Students’ perceptions of professors’ caring matters more than grit. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 31(1), 108-114.
- Flodén, J. (2017). The impact of student feedback on teaching in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(7), 1054-1068.
- Soria, K. M., & Stebleton, M. J. (2012). First-generation students’ academic engagement and retention. Teaching in Higher Education, 17(6), 673-685.
- Sozer, E. M., Zeybekoglu, Z., & Kaya, M. (2019). Using mid-semester course evaluation as a feedback tool for improving learning and teaching in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(7), 1003-1016.
- Veeck, A., O’Reilly, K. Mac-Millan, A., & Yu, A. (2016). The use of collaborative midterm student evaluations to provide actionable results. Journal of Marketing Education, 38(3), 157-69.
- Young, K., Joines, J., Standish, T., & Gallagher, V. (2018). Student evaluations of teaching: The impact of faculty procedures on response rates. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(1), 37-49.