Making the most out of feedback

Getting better at any activity is contingent on good quality feedback. Unfortunately, in the tertiary teaching context, we rely heavily on the bluntest of tools, the student feedback survey. While these defects are well known to those who are clued in on teaching and learning issues, they are often used by administrators and bureaucrats who don't understand how to interpret the data, especially for the purposes of promotions. Worse, some unis want to use these surveys to performance manage staff or even want to publish them like ratemyteacher.com.

In short the problems are these:

• Results are weighted heavily against large, first year units, especially where the subject material is particularly difficult. Small groups, upper year subjects and masters subjects weight much more positively. This is a big problem in difficult first year units with larger failure rates (eg Contracts) where struggling students will be keen to attribute their woes to the teacher rather than themselves.
• Surveys focus on evaluating teaching performance rather than student needs, which is a more important issue.
• Students are generally not experts on teaching and learning issues, so their feedback in this area is of limited use and often rests on how cool they think the lecturer is. Additionally, their knowledge of the subject field is generally not strong, after all they are students. So how can we ask them to evaluate how well the topic is being covered?
• Surveys usually take place in the last week of semester when numbers have diminished. This of course can boost your popularity as only the keenest students remain, however it is a disaster at understanding why students have already fallen by the wayside.

Cheapskate unis increasingly want to do online student feedback. Generally response rates will be low and heavily biased toward the disgruntled and crazy elements. And no, offering students a chance to win an iphone does not improve the quality of feedback. Who let the marketer into the room?

But, bureucrats love them because they have numbers and graphs. Stick them on a powerpoint slide and you have quantifiable management metrics. Poor quality metrics.

So, how are we to make the best of a bad situation. If we can't refuse to play the game, can we at least change the rules?

1. Cultivate a healthy feedback culture. Ask the students for some feedback, however small, every week. By doing this you can subtly re-orient the feedback process to discussing student needs rather than being a popularity contest. Classroom Assessment Techniques by Angelo & Cross (see a summary here) has a lot of good strategies. One example, 'the muddiest point', at the end of a lecture ask each student to write down which issue was the trickiest for them. The next lecture you can revisit these points and reinforce the fact that you are taking notice of student needs.

2. Get your teaching and learning coordiator or mentor to give you some feedback. Most will be happy to do this as it is a very important part of staff development, no matter what level of experience you have. If an experienced teacher looks over your outlines, sits in on a couple of lectures, they will be able to give you very valuable tips. If they write their comments up in report format, it can also be a useful piece of evidence for promotions, especially if you write a reflective response which details how you are going to integrate the feedback into your practice.

3. Simplify whereever possible. Students suffer from feedback fatigue and dread surveys. The best surveys have 3 or 4 qualitative questions that focus on specific subject based issues. Such as, "What was the most important thing you learnt from this subject?" "What is one topic that you would like to have seen covered or covered in more depth?" "Would prefer an examination in the place of the final assignment?" "What is one thing that would improve your learning in this subject?"

If you develop good feedback practices, particularly if they are shared across colleagues in your school, then you get better feedback and you have a more solid anchor to resist the impact of inferior university feedback mechanisms.