Teaching Tools
Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices | Teaching with Technology | Resources for Funding
1. Evaluation and Assessment
1.3. Evaluation
Feedback for Greater Teaching Efficiency
We know when our teaching produces good learning when we receive feedback about what students do and do not understand.
Sometimes that feedback comes in the form of ambiguous cues like students' facial expressions while we explain a topic. Other times we have to wait until students complete assignments or exams to evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts.
Good feedback guides your teaching and helps you efficiently identify when new strategies may be needed. Try these techniques to easily increase both the quality and quantity of the feedback you receive.
Techniques to improve quality and quantity of feedback
- Use classroom interaction to generate rapid feedback
- The more questions you ask, the more opportunities you have to see what students think and respond to it in detail.
- Follow-up questions can elicit interesting but flawed responses which enable you to address common misconceptions or misinterpretations in recitations, labs and review sessions.
- Also, assigning activities to small groups during class can allow you to observe their discussions or problem solving in progress, thus creating opportunities to learn quickly about what many of the students are thinking and provide immediate feedback as needed.
- Look for patterns of errors in assignments and exams
- When many students have the same difficulty, it makes sense to respond to the whole group. If you notice these patterns, you can often efficiently review material for everyone or create special handouts to address difficult issues.
- Tabulating the errors is a simple and essential first step to make sure that you don't overlook readily available feedback about the effectiveness of the teaching in your course.
- Use ungraded assignments to check students' comprehension
- If the course doesn't provide many opportunities for assessing students' understanding of the material, you and the students might learn a great deal from some "quick and dirty" in-class assignments.
- For example, you might ask students to write for 2-5 minutes to define a core concept (e.g. qualitatively rather than quantitatively) or to give one example of their own to illustrate how the concept can be applied.
- Instead of grading these assignments, you can quickly categorize them and provide feedback to the class about the strengths and weaknesses of different types of responses.
- Don't be afraid to ask students directly for feedback
- If you find yourself teaching students who appear to be unwilling to participate in class, you may need to examine some of your assumptions about the class and consider some alternative approaches.
- One great way to check your assumptions is to use an early course evaluation with open-ended questions. Many departments have a standard form which you might supplement with questions targeted to specific concerns you may have.
- Invite a Faculty Development staff member to observe your class
- For more feedback or ideas for getting your students more involved in class, invite a skilled and friendly observer to visit your class.
- Contact Faculty Development to arrange for a consultation/observation, or invite a faculty member or graduate student in your department whose teaching you respect.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
