1. CoursEval User Conference
Chicago, IL: September 24-25, 2015
“What Do You Do When You Do
What You Do with Student Ratings?”
Thomas J. Tobin, PhD, MSLS, PMP
Northeastern Illinois University
t-tobin@neiu.edu
What Good Are Student Reviews?
As the consumers of our courses, students are a logical source for feedback on course
quality. After all, they are the ones who sit through our classes, week after week (we
hope). They are eyewitnesses to our teaching efforts. Anyone who has asked a
student knows that they can quickly tell you what was good, or bad, about each course
they have taken. While there are many ways to gather information about an instructor’s
teaching practice, student reviews are a time-honored mechanism for doing so. In
reality, however, no single source of data about teaching practices can provide a
complete picture of what is happening in our classrooms.
Did you know?
A review of 50 years of credible, scholarly research on “student evaluation of teacher
performance” in higher education revealed the following findings:
 Student ratings from multiple classes provide more reliable results than those
from a single class, especially when ratings are based on fewer than 10
students.
 Ratings of the same instructor across semesters (i.e., same class, different
students) tend to be similar.
 The instructor, not the course, is the primary determinant of students’ ratings.
 Students’ ratings of their instructor’s communication, motivational, and rapport-
building skills most closely relate to their overall global rating of that instructor.
 Student ratings consistently and significantly relate to their level of achievement
of course learning outcomes, their instructor’s self-ratings, administrator and
peer ratings, and even ratings by trained observers.
 A number of factors are NOT related to student ratings, including the student’s
age, gender, year of study, GPA, and personality. Also, time of day and time
during the term when ratings are collected are not related to student ratings.
 Student ratings of face-to-face and online courses are more similar than they
are different.
(Benton & Cashin, 2011)

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What Are Students Qualified to Review?
Well, nothing. Students aren’t yet good evaluators, but they make great raters.
Students who take our courses are still learning our disciplines. While asking them to
provide feedback on our content expertise may seem premature, there are many
aspects of college teaching that students are well qualified to address.
Whether sitting in classrooms on our college campuses or logging in to our courses
online, students spend more time with our faculty members in a teaching environment
than anyone else. Who better than our students to ask how things are going?
In reviews of teaching, whether online or face-to-face, student are typically asked
questions about their instructors that fall into the following categories:
 Course organization and structure (e.g., “Rate the clarity of the syllabus in
stating course objectives, course outline, and criteria for grades.”)
 Communication skills (e.g., “Rate the effectiveness of the instructor's
explanations of why certain processes, techniques, or formulas were used.”)
 Teacher-student interactions (e.g., “Rate the students' freedom to ask questions
and express opinions.”)
 Course difficulty and student workload (e.g., Rate the instructor's skill in making
class materials intellectually stimulating.”)
 Assessments and grading (e.g., “Rate the effectiveness of exams in testing
understanding and not memorization.”)
 Student learning (e.g., “Rate the instructor's skill in emphasizing learning rather
than tests and grades.”
Note that students aren’t usually qualified to evaluate the quality or appropriateness of
any of these categories. We’d never ask students if we had too few or too many
exams, for example: they’d say “too many,” but not from a position of knowing how to
assess their own skills—just from a sense of workload.
How Much is Enough?
As you think about the many things you would like to learn from the students in a given
course, it will be easy to get carried away. You could quickly find yourself with an
evaluation instrument that would take students an hour to complete.
To get the rich, meaningful feedback you desire, you need to limit the questions that
you ask. Focus your questions on the key elements of the course you want to learn
more about. Consider using Likert-scale items for items like “Rate the instructor’s skill
in…” and open-ended response items for areas where you seek more detailed
responses, such as “What helped you learn in this course?” Remember, questions are
not worth asking if you won’t be able to take the time to carefully review the responses.

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While end-of-course surveys can provide instructors with helpful information that can
lead to improved teaching in future offerings, they fail to give direct benefit to the
students who complete them. Students, therefore, have a hard time taking them
seriously, since they do not see themselves as the beneficiaries of their efforts.
Faculty members can increase their response rates by demonstrating that they
genuinely care about, and listen to, the feedback they receive from their students. This
is especially important when these surveys are conducted in online courses, where
research has shown completion rates tend to be slightly lower than those for surveys
given in a face-to-face classroom (Nulty, 2008). One way to demonstrate that level of
commitment effectively is to create a culture of feedback in the course by soliciting
student feedback long before the end of the course.
Get Formative: The SCARF Model
It is a best practice to design formative evaluation processes to capture student
feedback throughout a course—and then make changes that benefit students right
away.
Formative student feedback differs markedly from the typical end-of-semester student
rating scheme. Design your instruments to ask for student opinions throughout the
course period about course pace, instructor presence and communication, and issues
that are confusing or unclear to the learners.
Formative feedback is aimed at the improvement of teaching. Because it is not tied to
employment decisions like hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion, go ahead and try
out different approaches: create broad goal statements; experiment with various
instrument designs and methods. To create formative processes, use the SCARF
design model (Solicit, Collect data, Adjust, and Return Feedback) for student-feedback
systems.
Open-Ended and Closed-Ended Feedback
Such feedback is seldom shared with the institution, and almost never goes into the
summative decision-making process. In online courses, formative open-ended
feedback is easier to employ than in a face-to-face environment: for example, most
learning management systems have survey tools, so there is no chance of handwriting
being recognized.
The ease of collecting open-ended feedback for online courses may lead some end-of-
semester student-rating instrument designers to include more open-ended questions in
order to learn more about an institution’s overall online program. I strongly suggest
using multiple-choice or other closed-ended questions for such purposes. Rosenbloom
(2014) studied the psychological impact of open-ended feedback in end-of-semester
ratings, and found, not surprisingly, that an unconscious bias exists to weigh open-
ended responses greater than other types of feedback.

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Thought Exercises
1. At your own institution, what do you want to learn about your own or your
colleagues’ teaching from student ratings of teaching effectiveness?
2. Does your campus use a single form for end-of-course student ratings (or perhaps a
common mandated set of questions added to departmental or individual feedback)?
3. What questions might you ask students during courses to help faculty members to
make responsive changes in-semester?
4. Students are best qualified to rate instructors’
 facilitation of learning,
 communication of ideas, and
 respect and concern for students.
How might survey instruments on your campus focus on these ratings areas?
5. What people or areas on your campus would need to be involved in order to test
and then approve any proposed instruments or changes?
6. What conversations will you bring back to your campus after this conference?