Publish student evaluations yes/no?

[richelbilderbeek]

Dear fellow instructors,

I was happy to see that there is a section about getting feedback from students, here.

What I would like to have advice on, is:

Should the raw students evaluation results be published?

• Pros: be transparent, students have the right to know how they evaluated a course, it motivates students, it allows to respond to it
• Cons: some teachers prefer being out of the possibility of having been given a bad review

Personally, I always do this (e.g. here) and put these in my public reflections. But hey, maybe I shouldn't?

What does the literature say (note: I found nothing, maybe I need to know a magic search term)?

Thanks and cheers, Richel

[stepas-toliautas]

The practical question on publishing evaluation results would be "why?", that is:
to what end will this help you to achieve your teaching goals?

Some points:

• Surveys are commonly used to track either participant satisfaction/ needs or perceived quality of the contents.
  • Satisfaction metric can be publicized for PR, but usually in averaged form (percentages or similar).
  • Participant needs may also be reflected in the training announcements ("we added this and that"), if the training is of periodic nature.
  • While tracking of the change in quality can, but does not have, to be public.
• Surveys are designed to extract "performance" metrics from the responses, not necessarily in a direct or plainly-visible way.
  Example: survey that has a question about course difficulty and also one about time spent weekly on course material. The answers to these will be correlated and it is likely not meaningful to average barely-learners with the diligent ones. So unless the course under consideration is on sociology, raw results are not immediately beneficial.
• Transparency, student response and motivation is best exploited by midterm polls -- then the teacher can adapt to the current batch, while the learners are assured that they are listened to.
  While "right-to-know", open reviews after the course ends are more likely to exaggerate the social media/ Yelp aspect of the administrative course-running process than they are to give useful information to all parties that can't be collected via internal feedback anyway.

[richelbilderbeek]

Thanks for the answer!

Note that I asked for what the literature says, instead of something that can be confused with a personal opinion.

Closing this Issue, as I assume that I really need to go back to Google Scholar to find those references :-)

[stepas-toliautas]

Note that I asked for what the literature says, instead of something that can be confused with a personal opinion. Closing this Issue, as I assume that I really need to go back to Google Scholar to find those references :-)

Well, my first two bullet-points on surveys can be extensively referenced by the list at the bottom of this. There are literally coursebooks on surveys.
Midterm and/or exit poll as an educational tool is narrower topic, granted, yet still they are widely used in HE institutions.
I could theoretically give a talk on educational surveys given preparation time to compile theory+experience in a presentable way, but this is definitely outside the scope of basic instructor workshop :)

I have to note still, that your question is too broad to answer with references unless you clarify why you think you want to publish evaluations at all. For example, I would challenge this statement:

students have the right to know how they evaluated a course

Today, institutions are discouraged from providing any kind of public feedback towards students -- grades are personal, comments are personal and so on. It only makes sense that this extends to the teachers as well, unless they have some personal benefit of being transparent, which then ought to be defined for oneself.

[richelbilderbeek]

Thanks again for the answer!

I agree that the why is important to see if the effect has been achieved.

I mentioned some reasons in the 'Pros' at the first post:

• To be transparent (but how important is that?)
• Students have the right to know how they evaluated a course (do they?)
• It motivates students (to what extent?)
• It allows students to respond to it (follows from being transparent, and how important is that?)

But my problem was that these are anecdotal (by me and/or others) and I cannot find these in the literature, hence this post.

All books I have at home do not recommend for/again publishing results online; they ignore it. This is weird, as having feedback from students has a high effect size (according to [Hattie, 2012], the effect size is 0.44, which is classified as a high effect size in figure 2.1. Note that this value differs from the original study, [Menges and Brinko, 1986], I assume this is caused by a different calculation method).

The original study, [Menges and Brinko, 1986] recommends further studies on a plethora of things, but hey, which study doesn't :-)

References

• [Hattie, 2012] Hattie, John. Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge, 2012.

• [Menges and Brinko, 1986] Menges, Robert J., and Kathleen T. Brinko. "Effects of Student Evaluation Feedback: A Meta-Analysis of Higher Education Research." (1986).