Getting Frequent Feedback in College Classes

From the Marshall Memo #430

In this New York Times article, Tamar Lewin describes the evaluation sheet that Boston University professor Muhammad Zaman has his biomedical engineering students fill out every two weeks. It asks students to rate him and the course anonymously on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale and then asks:

• How can the professor improve your learning of this material?
• Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation?
• In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?
• How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?
• Anything else you would like to convey to the professor?

What distinguishes Zaman from lots of other college teachers is that he is constantly using the feedback to re-engineer his teaching. For example, he discovered that one student was colorblind and couldn’t understand the diagrams made with colored chalk. “Without the evaluations, I probably would never have found that out, because no one likes to talk about their disabilities,” says Zaman. At another point, several students said the reading assignments were incomprehensible. He didn’t change the assigned reading (“Students don’t choose the curriculum,” he said), but began providing a list of terms and definitions. 

“A lot of college teaching is not very good,” says Zaman, “and everybody knows it. Having student evaluations at the end of the course doesn’t do anything to help it get better, and the person who does the evaluation can never benefit. To me it just seems intuitive to ask for ratings all along… I believe I have a contract with my students, that if they read, study, and do the homework, I will do my part to help them learn.” He immediately graphs the results, plans improvements, looks for trends, and e-mails students about fine-tuning he plans to do.

Lee Knefelkamp at Columbia University uses a similar system, distributing blank 5 x 7 cards every two weeks and asking them to write “What’s working for you?” on one side and “Of what are you needful?” on the other. “It’s an incredibly helpful process,” she says – it helps pinpoint things she overlooked, gets students thinking about their learning, and draws out shy students. 

“Feedback from Students Becomes a Campus Staple, but Some Go Further” by Tamar Lewin in The New York Times, Mar. 29, 2012, http://nyti.ms/H4AYoP