Student Course Evaluation Revisions, Phase 2

Our goals for creating new course evaluations were to develop questions that:

● are as bias-free as possible,

● examine the student perspective on their course experience by asking specific questions about what happened or didn’t happen in the course,

● are actionable and can result in improved student learning and faculty teaching.

“I think”/”I feel” questions ask for the student's perspective of what works for them in the course and were purposely written this way to reduce some of the inherent bias identified in course evaluation questions. Asking about the student’s experience, rather than the faculty’s performance, acknowledges that students can only provide their perception of the faculty's effectiveness since they are not teaching and learning experts. However, student voice matters and students' responses to these types of questions may elicit a pattern of responses that a faculty member could find useful.

The weighting of student course evaluations responses along with faculty reflection on those responses in the new Faculty Evaluation Summary Form helps to minimize the effect of an outlier's response to these questions on a faculty member’s evaluation. The revised evaluation process, approved last spring, requires that student course evaluations combined with the faculty member’s reflection on that feedback must count for between 20% and 30% of the Overall Rating in the annual Summary Evaluation Form for faculty evaluation for all faculty.

The proposed course evaluation questions listed below were carefully reviewed, selected and edited by 37 faculty and OIRA. Open ended questions have also been included to elicit suggestions for what could have been done differently by the instructor to enhance student learning.

These questions are designed for the various "lecture-based" courses: LEC, DLS, ONL, HYD, HYC, FLX. DL indicates questions that are for DL classes only or an alternate wording for DL classes. (We will address LAB, clinical, internship, apprenticeship, etc. at a later time.)

Important: We recognize that there are too many questions here for the student course evaluation. With analysis from OIRA, we will use your responses to this survey, along with information from student focus groups and the pilot surveys being administered in some classes this semester to narrow this down to a more reasonable length moving forward.