Evaluating teaching

Approach

• Make students aware of their role in evaluations. Describe what has changed in the subject based on previous evaluations (you can also describe this in the syllabus). Explain why evaluation is important, for you personally and for the quality of teaching.
• Think about what exactly you want information about: a learning activity you tried out? An assignment you gave students? Feedback you provided to students? Students’ learning experience during a class? Their engagement? The atmosphere? Then you can focus the questions on that. Let students know this too.
• Consider what time is appropriate for this. Right after the activity? At the end of the class? At the end of the course?
• Let students know at what times, in what way and on what subject they can give feedback.
• You can analyse the feedback yourself or together with students. What patterns emerge in the responses? Which points recur repeatedly?
• Draw conclusions and think about what you want to keep/change based on those conclusions and how. Let the students know.
• Suggested topics: see Appendix 1, p8 in the Guide to Conducting Effective Panel Discussions (Dutch).

UvA Q (with the option to add your own questions)

UvA Q is used as a baseline end-of-term evaluation for all courses. With the help of UvA Q, lecturers can structurally monitor the quality of their teaching and gain concrete insight into strengths and areas of concern in their courses. Structural evaluation enables monitoring over several years.

If desired, subject coordinators can indicate in the course information form which extra questions should be added to the evaluation. You can use the numbers from the question library below instead of entering this manually in the comments field.

Go to the UvA Q question library

Students can share their experiences and reflect on their learning. For this, you can use different approaches.

Keep the following points in mind when asking students for feedback:

• Create a learning climate in which you treat each other respectfully.
• Encourage students to come to you with issues of concern, so evaluation becomes an ongoing dialogue.
• Pay attention to how students can give constructive feedback to you and their peers.
• Make the evaluation opportunities as concrete and specific as possible: general, non-specific questions can easily lead to feedback that remains too vague to be useful.

Some methods you can use:

• Ask students orally or in writing what they would like to keep/remove/add in a class or course. Possible follow-up: have students categorise the points themselves and draw conclusions.
• Have students write down the most important point of the lecture and compare it with what you yourself thought was the most important point. Possible follow-up: discuss the outcomes during the next lecture. What contributed to it (not) corresponding to the point you wanted to convey?
• At the end of the module, have students write a letter to the students who have yet to take the course and describe what to expect. You can also have them do this specifically about a topic you want to collect information on (see approach).
• Have students draw a timeline in which they indicate moments in the classes where they experienced that they learned a lot or, alternatively, little and have them mark that learning line in it. Possible follow-up: Draw joint conclusions about what influences engagement with the subject, the subject matter and fellow students and lecturer.
• Have students write on a sticky note what helped them learn in that class and stick it on the door when leaving the room.
• A more systematic approach is possible with The Classroom Critical Incident Questionnaire (Brookfield). Students answer the same set of questions during the last 5 minutes of each lecture:
  • At what moment in class did you feel most engaged with what was happening?
  • At what moment in class were you most distant from what was happening?
  • What action that anyone (teacher or student) took did you find most affirming or helpful?
  • What action that anyone took did you find most puzzling or confusing?
  • What about the class surprised you most? This could be about your own reactions to what went on, something that someone did or anything else that happened.

Would you like support or tips on designing teaching evaluations? Then contact the Humanities TLC.

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