In the Fall Semester of 1995 I realized that, in order to validate
my current course innovations and to obtain accurate and helpful feedback
for future directions, I must find a way to get much more useful, objective
feedback from my students. To this end I decided to design my own course
evaluations with the following guiding principles for productive exchange
of information:
-
Remove the (un)popularity contest aspect from the questions and focus on
the success, or lack thereof, of the teaching-learning interaction.
-
Remove the informationally vague questions of the form: "on a scale
of 1 to 5 ... ".
-
Design questions requiring a written response, relativized to the context
of the course, and focused on the success, or lack thereof, of specific
important aspects of the course structure and methodology.
-
Include a thread of student self-assessment running through the chosen
questions, in order to help the students do a little self-reflection as
opposed to merely complaining, while transferring the responsibility for
all problems to the course and instructor.
Though my personal experiment with designing my own evaluations in Fall
1995 had interesting and positive results, for the following three semsester,
Spring 1996 through Spring 1997, I used a standard course evaluation comprised
of questions of the form "on a scale of 1 to 5 ... ". In Fall 1997 our
College Dean, Dr. Ken Kirk, asked all faculty to try designing their own
course evaluation questions, and since this approach has been so successful
it has become the standard. I have found this practice of designing/revising
course specific student evaluation questions each semsester to be an invaluable
source of constructive criticism on how to improve the course for future
students. In order to get a feeling for the types of questions I used please
visit my CKM Student Evaluations links
below. |