student evaluations

Rethinking End-of-Course Evaluations

Peter Filene, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that “teaching is only as successful as the learning it produces.” Students bring a certain set of expectations, personalities ,and learning dynamics with them at the beginning of

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The Agony and the Ecstasy: Reading Your Student Evaluations

A junior colleague asked me whether teaching for many years made me thicker skinned. They wondered whether reading student evaluations gets easier with time.

I was reminded of an essay by Stephen Marche (2023) on writers and the reviews they receive. Marche recounts the author

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Course Evaluations as a Tool for Growth

I remember my first year as a tenure-track professor as a nightmare. For reasons I won’t belabor, my teaching stunk. During class, my face was red and hot with humiliation as I fumbled through the content. During lectures, I prayed that no one would ask

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Using End-of-Course Ratings to Improve Instruction

Why this article is worth discussing: For those interested in using course evaluation results to improve teaching, this article offers a set of evidence-based recommendations—clearly described and supported with multiple references. The review focuses exclusively on using end-of-course evaluation results for improvement purposes. It covers

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What We Know about Online Student Evaluations

Online course evaluations are pretty much the norm now. Fortunately, the switch from in-class to online data collection has generated plenty of research that compares the two. Unfortunately, as is true for course evaluations generally, most faculty and administrators are less cognizant of the research

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Getting More Useful Written Comments from Students

Many faculty don’t expect to learn a lot from those end-of-course student comments. Students don’t write much, don’t always think carefully about what they write, and have been known to make ugly comments. Low expectations would seem to be justified, and that’s unfortunate. Because they’ve

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