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Assessment Feedback

New Service: Focus Group Course Feedback

As I continue my work on a subcommittee tasked with thinking about student evaluations of teaching, I’ve become even more convinced that we need different types of feedback on teaching. Our end-of-term course evaluations can sometimes give us useful feedback, but I’ve often found that I can’t do a lot with them. While it is nice to hear that a student enjoyed a course or appreciates my teaching, there is not much that I can do with that information.

Departments can develop peer review of teaching practices that provide faculty useful feedback, but sometimes we want to know what our students really feel about a certain text we assign or a certain assignment or activity we have them do.

Students are often afraid of giving us this feedback because they worry it will affect their grades. Even if we offer students the opportunity to provide anonymous feedback using an online form, they may not always trust that it won’t be connected back to them.

For this reason, I want to offer focus groups with students as a new CITA service. Here is one way the service might work. You can come up with a list of questions you’d like honest feedback on, and I can meet with a subset of your class to have a conversation on these topics. I can come to the start or the end of a class, and hold a conversation that may provide you with the type of feedback that will allow you to course correct or re-design a course that you will teach the following semester.

At the end of my conversation with your students, I will type up a brief report. If you have questions about how you might respond to student concerns that emerge from the focus group, we can also talk about concrete strategies or approaches you can use in your classroom.

Reach out with questions about this service or if you’d like to talk about any teaching-related topics.