Gathering and Using Student Feedback

Gathering and Using Student Feedback

Gathering and using student feedback is central to good assessment practice. Regularly monitoring your students’ learning, identifying gaps, and soliciting feedback on how your teaching is shaping their learning helps you determine what and how you need to teach going forward in the course. Consider the following questions:

• Do you have periodic low-stakes formative assessments for students to give you feedback on what they learned and what you need to clarify, elaborate, or explain better?
  • Are these assessments practical for your course format?
  • Do they connect meaningfully to the high-stakes summative assessments that students have to complete?
• Do you have a plan to check in with your students mid-semester to find out what's working well so far in the course and what you and they could do make their learning experience better?
  • Does your plan also consider how you will respond to your students' feedback? 

These questions are more critical now when you and your students may be teaching and learning in new ways - in a physically-distanced classroom, online, or in a hybrid format. 

This instructional guide is designed to help you answer these questions affirmatively and come up with a solid plan to gather student feedback and respond appropriately to close the teaching and learning loop. The process of gathering and using student feedback is an important aspect of scholarly teaching and promotes instructor and student metacognition.

This guide includes step-by-step instructions for you to develop:

• 1. a low-stakes formative assessment plan that you can use to check students’ understanding regularly and provide targeted and actionable feedback.

  2. a mid-semester student feedback survey that you can use to find out what's working well and what could be changed. You will also consider ways to administer the survey and respond to your students' feedback

What to do

Creating your low-stakes formative assessment plan

Pick one low-stakes formative assessments that meets the following criteria:

• Explicitly asks students to demonstrate their learning – what they know and can do
• Assessment questions/instructions are connected directly to course learning outcomes/objectives
• Assessment questions/instructions are connected directly a high-stakes assessment, so that students have the opportunity to learn from their errors, use your feedback, and demonstrate improvement in the high-stakes assessment.
• Assessment prompts students to think about their own learning and what gaps they need to fill and identify resources or strategies that would help them fill those gaps.
• Every student can complete it without issues of technology access, unreliable internet, or time zone constraints.

You may plan to do more than one type of low-stakes formative assessment, but for this worksheet you just need to respond to the following questions based on one of them.

Your Plan

Use the following questions to shape a plan for your low-stakes formative assessment. You can use your responses to create instructions for students, include it in the syllabus when describing assessments, or as an artifact when documenting your teaching.

1. What is the purpose of this assessment? What are you asking students to demonstrate by completing this assessment? What course learning objective/outcome does it connect to?
2. What do you want students to do to complete this assessment? Will they complete it individually or can they collaborate?
3. How will they submit this assessment? Consider electronic submissions even if your students are doing this during an in-person meeting to avoid physical contact with papers for health and safety reasons. Top Hat, Canvas Assignments, Quizzes, Quick Checks, Discussions, and Qualtrics Surveys facilitate electronic assessments from all students - in-person, virtual, and the ones who are unable to make it to class!
   
4. How will you grade students’ work? For completion or for accuracy? What is the point value? Is it reasonable with respect to the course grading scheme and effort required to complete it? Will it be auto-graded (Canvas quiz, Top Hat, etc.)?
5. How frequently do you want to conduct this assessment?
6. When will you administer it? Beginning of class session, during class session, after class session, online asynchronous on Canvas every week, etc.?
7. Who will give feedback? You? Other students (peer feedback)?. When will you review your students’ responses? In class? After class?
8. Is it practical for you to provide individual or group feedback via Canvas? This decision depends on how many students you have in your class and how much time you have to review your students’ work.
   
9. How will your feedback clarify questions and/or explain difficult concepts?
10. Can all students in your course complete this assessment? Are there any make-up options or grading policies such as lowest-score drops to ensure that students who have technology or internet issues or any family or health-related situations can still earn the points?

Creating your mid-semester student feedback survey

To gather meaningful student feedback, you need to:

• draft survey questions that you’d like to ask your students about what’s working well in the course and what can you and they do to improve their learning and have a positive experience
• determine how and when you will administer the survey, and
  
• formulate a plan on how you will respond to your students’ feedback.

Drafting your mid-semester survey

1. Your survey should include no more than 10 items with a combination of objective and open-ended questions that:
   • elicit actionable feedback about their course experience and learning.
     • Example: Which of the following resources (readings, videos, web resources, etc.) did you find helpful? Depending on the responses you get, you can focus on resources that are more helpful. If non-helpful ones are important, consider explaining their purpose and how students can use them.
   • are not double barreled.
     • Example: “Rate the usefulness of the homework assignments and the feedback you received” - separate items for usefulness of homework and usefulness of feedback.Your students may have found the homework assignment very useful, but found your feedback only somewhat useful.
   • are not leading.
     • Example: A Yes/No question such as “Did your instructor provide clear instructions to complete the final project?” can be rephrased as “Rate the extent to which the instructions provided to complete the final project were clear” and use a 5-point Likert scale.
       
2. Write a short message in a positive and welcoming tone that will you send to student to encourage them to fill out the survey. Your message should explain the purpose of the survey and your plan for responding to their feedback. You can also include this message as the first survey item.
   • Example Message: Hello Students!  We have been through about 8 weeks of classes so far. I would like to get some feedback on your experience with the course, how it is helping you learn. Please complete this short survey with 10 questions, which should take only about 10 minutes. This survey is anonymous so that you can provide honest and constructive feedback. The survey will close on August 31 after which I will review your responses. During the August 17 class session, I plan to share a summary of your feedback and discuss what changes we can make to improve your learning and experience for the rest of the semester. If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks for taking the time to let me know how the course is working for you!

Administering the survey

Once you've drafted your survey questions, you'll want to determine how and when you will administer your survey

1. How will you administer the survey?
   • Considerations:
     • Since paper surveys run the risk of virus contamination and cannot be completed by students who are in the classroom, consider not using paper surveys.
     • The Canvas Quiz tool is commonly used as an ungraded survey, but note that they are not completely anonymous as you can use Canvas analytics to know if a student has completed the quiz.
     • All IU instructors can activate their Qualtrics account, which can be used to create a truly anonymous survey. Check out more resources on creating a Qualtrics survey and the different types of questions.
2. When will you administer the survey?
   • Considerations:
     1. Pick a week during your course when you will keep the survey open. Give students at least one week to respond and send a reminder mid-week to increase survey responses

     2. Pick a week that is not during or right after a major examination or assessment as your students’ responses might focus heavily on their experience with the exam.

Responding to your students’ feedback

Once you've implemented your survey, you will need to draft a summary of responses so that you can debrief the survey results with your students. You can consider the following:

• Compile numerical data (objective questions) and themes (open-ended questions) focusing on what’s working well, what could be improved, specific reasons provided for need for improvement, specific strategies provided for improvement
• How do you plan to share your summary? Via email? During an in-person or synchronous-video session?
• If your students are asking for specific changes that you are unable to make due to any reason, how do you plan to communicate that transparently to students?
• This post from University of Pittsburgh's University Center for Teaching and Learning provides concrete examples of how to decode and respond to student feedback.

Thinking about questions to use for your mid-semester student survey? You can start with these examples! Contact the CTL if you'd like to work with a consultant to develop your survey.