Student Feedback
Using student feedback to aid in the continuous improvement of effective and impactful teaching.
Gathering Student Feedback
While students are not subject or pedagogy experts, students spend more time with faculty than anyone else and can provide valuable information about instructor behaviors such as whether the instructor was engaging, prepared, organized, and understandable. When used in combination with other components of teaching evaluation, and when interpreted carefully, student feedback is a valuable tool for measuring effective teaching. Each school or department should determine how to gather student feedback on teaching effectiveness.
The Process of Gathering Student Feedback
One way to gather student feedback is to use the Student Instructional Rating Survey (SIRS), a university-wide survey of students for their comments about their experiences in the classroom. The results are used by the individual instructors, departments, schools, and the University for the assessment and improvement of teaching. Faculty members are asked to provide summaries of the student survey statistics for personnel decisions such as tenure, promotion, or merit-based pay. All members of the University have access to the summary statistics from the student surveys at SIRS Results web site.
For more immediate feedback, a midcourse survey can provide insight into how the students are feeling about the course at any point in the semester. Midcourse surveys are generally intended solely for the use of the instructors, but some schools or departments may choose to run a more formalized midcourse survey.
Upcoming Workshops
Visit Workshops and Training to browse a complete selection of our available workshops.
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Interpreting SIRS and other forms of Student Feedback
Friday, September 13, 2024, 1:00-2:30 pm
While students are crucial stakeholders in the university’s teaching enterprise, their feedback should not be mistaken for “evaluation of teaching,” which is a task for instructional colleagues. Student feedback is an indicator which provides evidence that must be interpreted. In this workshop, we explore scholarly research on the limitations and potential biases of student feedback. We present strategies for how department chairs and program directors should review, interpret, and utilize the likert-scale and comment responses from the Student Instructional Ratings Survey (SIRS) to improve course curriculum, support faculty, and evaluate teaching. This workshop is especially beneficial for those who regularly engage with SIRS, but we also encourage anyone from the university community interested in learning about best practices in interpreting student feedback to join us. To attend the workshop or to receive the video recording after the workshop, please register.
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Interpreting and Utilizing Student Feedback for Change: Midcourse Surveys
Monday, September 30, 2024, 2:00-3:30 pm
Do you know what your students think about your lectures, discussions, activities, or your carefully crafted selected assignments? This workshop is geared toward instructors and explores how to conduct a midcourse survey using Blue or another platform like Google Forms. We provide a discussion of how to employ quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data you obtain, and how you should share this information with your students. Our underlying focus in this session is to help you develop the insight you need to address student concerns and make course adjustments before the term is over.