Midterm isn’t just a good time to take stock of student learning, it’s also a good time to take stock of faculty teaching.
While many faculty members use student evaluations at the end of term to help them tweak — or totally rethink — a class for the next semester, staff at the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology are proponents of an ongoing dialogue with students about not only class content, but the class itself.
“One of the primary benefits (of midterm assessments) is that you can then make adjustments for the students who are there in your class,” said Todd Vanek, a learning design consultant with CTLT.
Asking students questions such as, “What’s working?” “What isn’t working?” “What could you do to help yourself?” “What could I do to help you?” is a great way to find out about any problems, either individual struggles or classwide confusion, while there is still time to supplement the planned material or try something different.
The College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Resource Sciences and the College of Engineering and Architecture have organized a voluntary, online midterm assessment that their faculty can choose to participate in this semester. But beyond that formal assessment procedure, other faculty members at WSU have long asked students for feedback on specific assignments or the course in general.
Corinne Mantle-Bromley, chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning, said asking for periodic student feedback is nothing new.
“I think that good teachers are always in tune with how their students are experiencing the class,” she said.
The College of Education does not require faculty to ask students for midcourse feedback, but Mantle-Bromley said it is common practice because not only do faculty want the information, but they want to model the behavior for their students who are learning to be teachers.
“My experience is that it is scary the first couple of times,” she said, but the information gained is so worthwhile that most faculty get over their discomfort quickly. “You have to be willing to sincerely listen to the comments and be willing to make changes.”
Sometimes, she said, students question content that seems boring or irrelevant, but obviously that does not necessarily mean that the information can or should be dropped from the class.
If the information is important, she said, perhaps faculty members need to find a more authentic, meaningful way to present it. Most often that does not mean another lecture on the subject, but instead a problem, project or activity that engages the students with the material and each other or a wider community. If getting through the information really is a slog, perhaps just acknowledging that and assuring students that the pieces eventually will come together can be helpful.
“My experience is (asking for feedback) always makes me better and it makes my students more appreciative of the course,” Mantle-Bromley said.
Joan Anderson, an assistant professor in Apparel, Merchandising Design and Textiles, is chair of the assessment committee for CAHNRS. She helped formulate the online end-of-term student evaluations that CAHNRS began using in 2003 on a voluntary basis and in 2005 as a collegewide requirement.
She is also a proponent of midterm feedback, as long as faculty members “close the loop.”
“It’s one thing to check in; it’s another to respond to the results,” she said. “If you don’t respond, why bother?”
Anderson, in collaboration with Gary Brown and Stephen Spaeth, recently wrote an article for the online journal Innovate that challenges the argument that end-of-term paper-and-pencil evaluations completed in class are superior to online evaluations because the response rate is significantly higher.
One reason students don’t complete end-of-term online evaluations is because they don’t think their comments are truly valued, Anderson said. Asking for student feedback while there is still time to respond in class, she said, goes a long way toward showing that faculty members do value student opinions and do care about how students are experiencing the class.
“The bottom line is, we showed it is an issue of engagement,” she said.
For more information about assessment activities at CTLT, go to https://ctlt.wsu.edu/assessment.
