Teaching Evaluations

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I think most of us in academia complain about teaching evaluations in one way or another and many articles have been written on the problems with student evaluation of instruction. Since we made the switch to online evaluations another problem is low response rates. Some faculty have "tricks" that they claim work: offering extra credit if a certain response rate is reached, threatening not to grade exams if a certain response rate is NOT reached, giving in-class time to fill them out. I've tried some of these but the rates are still quite low. For online classes it's even worse. So on top of the other issues with student evaluation of teaching, there may not be enough data either.

At my university, they encourage us to use "multiple measures of teaching effectiveness" in the form of midterm evaluations of some kind. I have used Small Group Instructional Diagnosis several times to get feedback on what is and isn't working in classes. This semester I am using a "Bare Bones" survey in my intro class to see what students are struggling with. This doesn't use any class time to administer and I can still present some results in class in a week. In both of these examples, the feedback is anonymous to the instructor and students might appreciate hearing how their concerns can be addressed. I also like the idea of improving a course as it goes rather than having to wait for the next time it's taught.

These midterm evaluation results can also still be reported in my annual report, so that is helpful to balance out the tables of numbers that result from the traditional evaluations. Hopefully students see the midterm evaluations as a chance to contribute to class planning. I fear that end-of-semester online evaluations feel like another post-purchase survey from a store and reinforce the student-as-consumer model. What are your experiences and thoughts on teaching evaluations? Is there a better way?

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