Assessment of Teaching - Interpreting Student Feedback

Guidance from Faculty Affairs

Faculty Affairs and the Standing Committee for Assessment of Teaching Effectiveness have developed the following resources to guide Student Feedback Reviewers.

• Changes to the Assessment of Teaching Effectiveness

  This webpage describes the new process for two Student Feedback Reviewers as they evaluate student feedback for promotion.

• Recommended Charge to Student Feedback Reviewers in the Faculty Teaching Assessment Process

  This webpage describes what Student Feedback Reviewers are expected to do to evaluate a candidate's student feedback. It also clarifies that the report is not a summary of student feedback.

• FAQ about Student Feedback Use in the Assessment of Teaching Effectiveness
• Guidance for the Optional Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  This webpage provides guidance for optionally using AI to summarize qualitative student feedback. AI must not be used to generate the final, 750-word evaluative statement about the candidate’s teaching effectiveness.

Interpreting Student Course Feedback

The guidance below depends on having sufficient student responses (a high enough response rate) to be confident that the feedback is representative of the students enrolled in the course. When response rates are low, respondents' views are less likely to represent other students' views. Most instructors have much lower response rates with the SEEQ, which is an expected outcome of any new feedback instrument.

If you have questions about any of the information below, please feel free to reach out to our faculty consultants or send an email to site@psu.edu.

End-of-Course Student Feedback

• Is intended to represent the collective opinion of students enrolled in the same course
• Is an effective method for gathering student perceptions
• Is not intended to measure students’ learning
• Students are one source of information used by faculty and administrators to evaluate teaching
• Most faculty agree that student feedback should be part of teaching evaluation

Guidelines for Faculty Evaluating Other Faculty

• Contradictory written comments are common and not necessarily a sign of poor teaching
• Look for consistent, common themes and patterns across the results
• Interpretations should focus on views held by many students, rather than rare or outlier views
• Be familiar with biases faced by your colleagues so you do not inadvertently amplify biased student comments
• Rare comments should not be considered equivalent to more frequent comments
• Avoid using the most common type of faculty as the norm because this may reflect systemic biases
• Avoid comparing faculty candidates—faculty members do not teach under identical circumstances
• Do not calculate a composite score across all courses in the review period because it artificially inflates the weight of anomalous courses
• Student feedback should be only one source of evidence in the evaluation of teaching

Other Sources of Evidence for Faculty Evaluation

Members of promotion committees will want to compare student feedback with other sources of teaching evidence such as those below. This is particularly important when response rates are low. When only a few students respond, we cannot have confidence that the responses are representative of students in the course.

• Faculty self-assessment
• Peer and administrator observations
• Internal or external reviews of course materials
• Samples of student work
• Student interviews and focus groups
• Teaching portfolios
• Teaching and learning scholarship

The information above draws on a Penn State University Faculty Senate Report (Appendix R, March 14, 2017), which was adapted from Interpreting and using student ratings data: Guidance for faculty serving as administrators and on evaluation committees, Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54 (2017), pp. 94–106 by A. Linse.

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