My latest article for the Korea Herald is now out and it is on using teacher evaluations. Read it at the Korea Herald site or look in the extended entry.

Hope you enjoy this one as it’s that time to loook at your evaluations and see what your students think of your class and consider what administration is evaluating you on.

Korea Herald Readers

Welcome. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on this weeks column. If you would like to learn more about me visit my bio page. I have also been blogging at this site for 4 years so there are a lot of entries if you care to look through the archives. Some of my favorite or more popular entries are available on the classic entries page.

Teacher evaluations are a bittersweet pill that every university teacher faces each term. Many teachers look at these evaluations as a flawed popularity contest, and to a point they are right, even though a lot of information can be gleaned from these students responses if you look carefully.

The first thing that teachers should do is get a translation of the standard questions, if your department has not already provided one for you. This way you’ll be able to see exactly what the university is interested in regarding students and their assessment of instructors. Some of these questions will be relatively useless and others will be very helpful. The problem with most evaluations is that they include the same questions university wide and thus are too general to be a true evaluation of a teacher.

Now take a look at your overall average; how does it compare to others in your department and the university in general? If your numbers are low, look at all of your classes. Is there one class that brought the average down? If so, examine that class in detail and try to remember how the class felt during the semester. Were there any incidents that stand out that could have brought your average down?  This specifically happened to me this semester. I have even isolated the incident and I know exactly what I will change for future classes.

If your numbers are all around the same, then it’s time to look at your scores for each question in each class. If there are one or two questions brining your average down, you now know what topics you need to develop for the following semester. In my experience and from talking with other teachers in various universities this is mostly what administration is concerned with.

However, the part of the evaluation that you can get the most information from is the comments students leave you. These will be mostly written in Korean, and it may require you to find a Korean person you can trust to translate the comments for you.

In these comments it’s pretty safe to ignore the comments about your appearance, i.e., “Teacher is handsome/pretty.” I also generally ignore the “teacher gives too much homework”-type comments because all students complain about that—even the semester I gave only two homework assignments I received the same complaint.

Now, take a look at your negative criticisms and decide if they are valid. If they are, consider what you can do to rectify that area. Then, look at your positive comments and use those to help you to understand what to continue doing in the classroom. Finally, the best comments are the ones that are both negative and positive. This indicates that the student found the work both difficult but recognizes the value of what you have done. For example “The weekly learning journal was too difficult, but it really helped me.” These comments balance the ones by students who want to coast through class.

The best way to get feedback from students that will help you to be a better teacher and also improve your standardized evaluations is to conduct your own evaluations. On my evaluations (available for download on my blog) I ask standard questions such as “was your instructor on time for class” and “your teacher gave you enough time to practice”—these are questions that I know the answer to. I am always 5–10 minutes early to class, so if a student gives me low scores on these questions, I will not place much value on the remaining answers.

On the second half of the page I ask questions specifically about activities we have done in the class. This is where I get the most useful information for tweaking and adjusting future semesters. Questions are sometimes about specific activities, and other times about the textbook or units in the textbook. Responses to this information are very helpful.

I conduct these evaluations on the last class before exams. The evaluations are distributed in class with instructions to not include names or student numbers. I then nominate one student to collect the surveys when finished and bring them to my office. I leave the room so that students do not feel intimidated by my presence and feel free to respond as they like. I also take care to not look at the surveys until the grading is completed.
While the standard evaluation system at many universities is flawed, it can still be useful to you and should not be dismissed as invalid and merely a popularity contest.