What do students think about the learning process? This article describes the patterns of what students think about their learning, gathered from 45 classes using mid-semester Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID). We learned that SDIGs provided insights into students' perceptions of how learning works that are not identified in the…

Faculty members traditionally develop a teaching philosophy statement (TPS) as part of the job application process, for tenure reviews, or to encourage reflection. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach--to develop the TPS with students as the primary target audience, distribute it to students at the beginning of a course, and collect…

One of the simplest indicators of teaching or course effectiveness is student ratings on one or more global items from the entire rating scale. That approach seems intuitively sound and easy to use. Global items have even been recommended by a few researchers to get a quick-read, at-a-glance summary for summative decisions about faculty. The…

This study compared end-of-semester student ratings from students who provided mid-semester feedback with those who did not, to measure how consistently students rated teaching effectiveness. Participants included 394 undergraduates in seven classes. Within each class, participants randomly formed the primed group, completing an online survey…

Student Ratings of Teaching (SRT) are widely employed to evaluate teaching for both formative and summative purposes. The appropriateness of items on these forms is one factor among many determining the utility and validity of SRT. Another is whether stakeholders are sufficiently knowledgeable to interpret the resulting data. Evidence gathered…

A provincial initiative to encourage interprofessional education and research resulted in the implementation of three interprofessional PBL (iPBL) modules at the University of Saskatchewan. The ambitious target of 1200 student iPBL experiences over three years presented a substantial teaching development challenge. Training incorporated many of…

In a first-year engineering course with an enrollment of approximately 1900 students per year, seventy-eight undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of their graduate teaching assistants were obtained using a modified Adjective Generation Technique. Based upon student feedback, researchers identified three themes of highest concern to the…

Most faculty developers have a wide variety of rating scales that fly across their desk tops as their incremental program activities unfold during the academic year. The primary issue for this column is: What is the quality of those ratings used for decisions about people and programs? When students, faculty, and administrators rate a program or…

The Two Survey Method (TSM) is a new time-efficient tool for gathering formative student feedback. Based on the Delphi technique, the TSM uses iterative surveys to develop student consensus about key strengths and suggestions for instruction. Evaluation data indicate that both faculty and students are satisfied with the method's efficiency and the…

The number of international faculty members in the United States is steadily increasing. However, few of these instructors have formal training in pedagogy and many experience at least some communication difficulties. To address the needs of nonnative-speaking instructors at an urban college in New York, an international faculty program was…

Argues that, although student evaluation of instruction is ubiquitous at colleges and universities, evaluations are rarely used for formative evaluation. Offers a guide for faculty use of student evaluations for the improvement of teaching. Suggests ways of finding meaning in both the numbers and student comments. (Contains 14 references.) (NB)

Discusses the results of a national study of 930 (response rate 71%) community colleges' evaluation methods for faculty who have achieved tenure or who have long-term status. Identifies current practices and perceptions regarding post-tenure faculty reviews in community colleges. Asserts that faculty evaluation practices need to be changed if they…