Instead of the usual try these questions instead:
Your insights into your learning in this course can help me see our course from your side of the desk. Please respond to any three of the statements below (more if you’d like). Submit these anonymously; I will use them as I plan for my courses next semester.
In this course …
- it most helped my learning of the content when…because…
- it would have helped my learning of the content if…because…
- the assignment that contributed the most to my learning was… because…
- the reading that contributed the most to my learning was… because…
- the kinds of homework problems that contributed most to my learning were…because…
- the approach I took to my own learning that contributed the most for me was…because…
- the biggest obstacle for me in my learning the material was… because…
- a resource I know about that you might consider using is…because…
- I was most willing to take risks with learning new material when… because…
- during the first day, I remember thinking…because…
- what I think I will remember five years from now is…because…
You can also add a query such as the following: What is something covered in this course material that you can do now that you could not do or did not fully understand at the beginning of the term?
And:
…If you’re interested in improving something like organization, if you define it behaviorally, you can change what you, do which is a lot easier than changing what you are. Organization has never been one of my strong suits and I didn’t make much progress trying to “be” organized. But when I started putting a skeleton outline on the board, when I stopped five minutes before the end of period and used the outline to summarize, when I began class working with students to create a list of points to remember from last class, I was seen by students as being more organized.
But it isn’t all good news. A collection of dashed off student comments collected at the end of the semester doesn’t easily translate into an action-based improvement agenda. What the student comments mean is probably not what you think they mean. Communication about the impact of teaching policies and practices on efforts to learn needs to be ongoing so there’s an opportunity for clarifying feedback, adjustments and then more feedback. We can and should make efforts to change the way our institutions collect student assessments, but, until that glacier melts, we need to take matters into our own hands and solicit a different kind of feedback and at different times during the course….
Italics and emphasis mine
“The Teaching and Learning Quality survey, created by Theodore W. Frick, who is now an emeritus professor in Indiana University at Bloomington’s School of Education, attracted interest from dozens of institutions about five years ago. Its questions focus on students’ perceptions of effective educational practices (prompts include “I was able to connect my past experience to new ideas and skills I was learning” and “My instructor demonstrated skills I was expected to learn”).
To study the instrument, instructors assessed student work in 12 courses one month after the courses had ended. Researchers compared those assessments with the results of Mr. Frick’s survey, finding a clear relationship: Students who’d said they frequently saw effective practices in use showed high levels of mastery.
For critics, the problems with student evaluations are too fundamental to be fixed…..
“What they really measure is ‘student satisfaction,’” Ms. Nilson wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “They bear no relationship at all to learning.””
emphasis mine
from:http://chronicle.com/article/Can-the-Student-Course/234369