Every fall and spring semester, many professors conduct what we call “mid-semester assessments,”  where students provide their instructors written feedback on how the course is going so far.  Sounds like a reasonable thing to do, right?  Well, not according to some instructors.  Here is some of the feedback I’ve received from our faculty:

“For courses like mine that are taught with advanced pedagogical approaches, mid-semester evaluations are like asking an audience what they think of a play after the first act – clearly silly. Moreover, these unhelpful evaluations also reduce our ability to get students to invest still more time in the year-end reviews – the evaluations that really are appropriate and useful.”

“I think it is risky during the middle of the semester to empower students to think they can dictate how and what a professor should teach. The proof is in the pudding and the final grades. The most common complaint I get from students is that I talk too fast, my response is that the typical person speaks about 125 words per minute, and that a good note taker can capture about 45 words per minute…” and so on.

These comments are concerning to me for several reasons:

1) Instructors believe that students need to have experienced the entire course before their feedback is valuable.  Translate: My course is perfectly scripted and nothing you can say or do will change what I need to accomplish.

2) Student feedback dictates how the course should be taught. Translate:  I’m the expert in this subject, not the student.  Only I know how it should be taught.

What’s wrong with these assumptions? First of all, the “definition” of formative assessment can be thought of as, “…a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievements of intended instructional outcomes…the labeling of assessments and tests can lead to misunderstanding. Formative assessment is vulnerable as it is often misunderstood or misinterpreted as a particular test or product, as opposed to a process used by teachers and their students as an ongoing gauge of the current status of student learning.” (http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/FASTLabels.pdf)

A good example is this:  Formative assessment is when the chef tastes the soup; summative assessment is when the customers taste the soup.  Think of yourself as the chef–you need feedback on whether the course is going well. Think of the end of course evaluations as the customer tasting the soup–this is when you hear how good or bad it really was, but at a point when you can’t do anything about it.

The #1 best use of mid-semester assessments?  Determine what you want to know from your students that you can change about the course, and ask them.  Remember: It’s not about YOU. It’s about the students’ learning experience in the course–so ask them that. Prompts that could be used:

What about this course supports and encourages your learning?

What about this course inhibits your learning?

Notice that the questions aren’t about what the instructor is doing well or could improve, they’re about how the course could better support their learning.  The responses will generally be the same, but the student puts the focus on the class as a whole, not on the instructor’s choice of sweaters or heavy accent.  Typical student responses read:

“He should spend more time explaining and giving real-world examples and less time reading off the powerpoint.  His examples are interesting and help me to better understand the topic.”

“I like how she takes time to make sure that everyone is following along.  The group work helps to break up the long sessions.”

“In such a large class, it would help if he would wait a little longer for students to respond when he asks questions, especially for those of us who sit in the back of the auditorium, we never get called on to answer because he can’t even see us.”

These are all things that the instructor can change, do not impact the content or tell the teacher how he/she should be teaching the course.  These comments explain, from the students’ perspective, what they need to learn better or what is working well to promote their learning.