The University of British Columbia

Design and Use of Midterm and End of Term Student Surveys to Improve Learning

Questions or Goals

This project is aimed at sharing what we learn about the best ways of asking and using student feedback. Evidence-based teaching means searching for ways evaluating how well teaching efforts are helping students learn, AND reacting to what is discovered. As the EOS Science Education Initiative progresses, we are constantly trying to improve the usefulness of feedback requested and received from students.

Implementation

Rather than a specific research project, this is more of an ongoing effort to optimize issues such as (i) what to ask, (ii) how it is asked, (iii) when to ask it, (iv) how to manage results from many students, and (v) what to do about with the information. There is plenty of exprience to gain from the literature, from colleagues, and from doing many surveys. Surveying is done for various reasons and at various times in most classes the EOS-SEI project is working on. Links below point to recommendations and other forms of what's been learned.

People (contacts)

Francis Jones is compiling the collective wisdom gathered by all STLFs (see the project contacts) and products listed below.

Progress

As of summer 2009, approximately instructors in 17 EOSC or ATSC courses have used a total of approximately 30 surveys to learn about student opinions of the pedagogy or experiences in these courses. Most surveys were delivered on line but some are simple paper or ScanTron surveys. Please ask F. Jones (contacts) for details or examples if interested.

Products (papers, presentations, etc)

Outcomes from most surveys are used immediatly by instructors and are not made public. However, some results have been gathered as follows:

1. EOS-SEI Times, vol 2, No. 1. (Jan. 2009) - Making the most of Midterm Course Feedback Surveys.
2. Poster presented at The International Conference on Improving University Teaching (IUT), Vancouver BC, July 14-17, 2009. (Poster PDF, ~650Kbyts).
3. Examples: (A) midterm survey for eosc222, spring 2011: survey, analized results.

Intentions

1. Ideally we would like to make it easy for instructors to deliver survey questions and produce results in "standard" formats that are imediatly useful. Perhaps a suite of recommended questions could be provided.
2. We might also produce a short "recommendations" paper.

Anticipated benefits to undergraduate learning

All students benefit when instructors actively seek to make their courses as effective as possible. Feedback from students is one part of helping make this happen.

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