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‘Teaching Evaluation’

Mid-Semester Student Feedback

Sep. 17, 2019—The feedback students provide about your teaching on their end-of-semester course evaluations can be valuable in helping you improve and refine your teaching.  Soliciting mid-semester student feedback has the additional benefit of allowing you to hear your students’ concerns while there is still time in the semester to make appropriate changes.  A Small Group Analysis...

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Making Course Evaluations More Meaningful

Apr. 11, 2016—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director Course evaluations for spring semester courses begin today. When I served on the Provost’s Committee on the Evaluation of Teaching a couple of years ago, I found that instructors commonly face two challenges when it comes to course evaluations: motivating students to complete them (and thus increasing response rates) and...

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Interpreting and Making Sense of Course Evaluations

Dec. 22, 2014—As the semester draws to a close, our students are given the opportunity to provide us with potentially valuable feedback on our teaching and its effects on their learning.  You may find it challenging, however, to interpret what your end-of-semester course evaluations mean and decide how to act on them. The CFT can help.  A...

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Ask Professor Pedagogy: Student Evaluations

Sep. 21, 2012—Ask Professor Pedagogy is a twice monthly advice column written by Center for Teaching staff. One aspect of our mission is to cultivate dialogue about teaching and learning, so we welcome questions and concerns that arise in the classroom; particularly those from Vanderbilt faculty, students, and staff. If you have a question that you’d like Professor P...

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Upcoming Event: Going Public with Teaching Evaluations

Sep. 18, 2012—Join us for this upcoming Conversation on Teaching! Going Public with Teaching Evaluations Date & Time: Tuesday, September 25 4:10-5:30pm   Beginning this Fall, Vanderbilt students will have access to quantitative information from course evaluations so that they may be more informed about their choices of instructors and classes.  This is part of a larger...

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Interpreting and Making Sense of Course Evaluations

Dec. 14, 2011—As the semester draws to a close, our students are given the opportunity to provide us with a potentially valuable source of feedback on our teaching and its effects on their learning.  You may find it challenging, however, to interpret what your end-of-semester course evaluations mean and decide how to act on them. The CFT...

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What Should You Do When Student Evaluations Are Wrong?

Mar. 10, 2011—by Derek Bruff, Assistant Director Over on the ProfHacker blog today, Vanderbilt PhD alumna Heather Whitney shares her recent experience discovering that students were saying things on her end-of-course feedback survey that were verifiably incorrect. Several students complained that they felt it unfair that they weren’t told how their final projects were going to be...

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Better Course Evaluation Forms?

Apr. 29, 2010—This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features an article on efforts around the country to improve the course evaluation forms students complete at the end of each semester.  Ideas for improvement mentioned in the article inclue: Mechanisms by which departments and instructors can customized the standard forms used in their schools, such as those provided...

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