Teaching Journal (9): Course evaluations

When I saw students' comments in my course evaluation last semester, I realized that students really don't know how to evaluate a course or the instructor. The comments were all over the place, from sweet but relatively unhelpful praises about me to complaints that the course did not sufficiently deal with new information technologies when I explicitly told them in the introductory class that we will look at old technologies and science in general. There were also contradictory comments about there being too much writing on one hand and the feedback they received from me being very helpful on the other. And I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, either, but there is no dialogue between the two comments so there's no way for me to know what they mean in the context of an entire course.

I see two immediate problems with end-of-semester anonymous course evaluations.

1) Seeing the evaluations after the course is over means that the instructor can't make any changes to address concerns. During the very first course I taught last year, I gave out mid-semester evaluations for feedback but I quickly realized that I'm too much of a novice to improvise mid-semester to meet the needs of the particular group. And so for two semesters I haven't administered the mid-semester evaluation. But perhaps I'm now experienced enough to try this out again.

2) Anonymity means that the students are protected to make honest comments but it has also come to (unnecessarily) mean that students complete the evaluations in isolation from other students. There are already issues of reliability when administering an evaluation survey on one day during the 13-week semester. But to have the evaluations be only a solo affair adds to the problems. How about a focus-group style evaluation where students can draw on the pool of memory about the entire course, rather than relying on their own limited memory? I do think that anonymous and individual evaluations are also useful but should not be the only type of evaluation that is meaningful. Isolating students during evaluations takes away from the idea that seminars are driven by group learning.

Even when I was an undergrad, I was never taught how to complete a course evaluation. The survey is considered self-explanatory and the comments are seen as peripheral. Now that I'm teaching, I find the comments the most interesting (and frustrating) to read. It's when I am most challenged and also the most meaningfully acknowledged for my efforts. This semester, just before administering the course evaluations, I invited all the students to recall my objectives for the course (which are to help students become critical scholars and engaged citizens) and to consider this when doing the evaluations. I also told them (may for the first time) that the department takes the evaluations very seriously. I asked them why the evaluations may be important for the department to arrive at the idea that they help to meet the learning needs of students. To this end, I asked them to consider their own learning needs and limitations and be aware of them when evaluating the course.

I left the room as part of the ritual of anonymous evaluations and wondered if I came across as too defensive and trying to sway their comments in my favour. I was stricken with fear. I haven't seen the evaluations yet but will find out whether or not my words helped students to comment in a meaningful way. I need to figure out a better way of doing this, I think.