Dutton Digest, November 2023

Eliciting Student Feedback

Feedback is an important idea in teaching and learning. Students need it to understand their performance on assignments, and instructors need it, too: feedback from students can help improve your teaching. What are students finding difficult to understand? Are they navigating the course with ease, or are they frustrated? Have explanations been clear? Do your students feel welcome and included in your classroom? If students haven’t been mastering course activities, what might help them?

Students appreciate efforts to disrupt one-way communication to ask them what they think, and data collected during the semester (instead of at the end of the course) can be particularly valuable because there is still time to make changes for the current students.

There are lots of resources to help you get started with collecting student feedback! Times Higher Education has a short article called Want To Know How Your Class Is Going? Ask Your Students.

And the following pieces from the Dutton Institute’s Teaching and Learning Showcase offer examples you can put to use right away:

• Feedback Loops and Formative Assessment: Gathering Feedback from Students About the Effectiveness of Your Course
• Questioning Students to Elicit Feedback About Your Course
• Surveying Students to Check for Understanding
• Surveying Students Mid-semester to Instigate Immediate Changes

On the heels of a switch from the Student Rating of Teacher Effectiveness (SRTE) to the Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (SEEQ), Penn State will begin soliciting mid-semester feedback from all students starting in the spring of 2024 with a Midsemester Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (MSEEQ). Take a minute to read about MSEEQ and what questions it will include here, but don’t let it deter you from offering additional opportunities to connect with your students during class to gain an understanding of how they feel and what you can do to improve or enhance their experience in your course.