Mid-Course Feedback
Collecting feedback from students about halfway through the semester allows instructors to gain insightful, actionable information about how their course is going. Mid-course feedback allows instructors to learn what aspects of the course are working well for their students and identify any issues that can be addressed without having to wait until end-of-semester feedback.
If you would like to collect mid-course feedback from your students, please feel free to make a copy of our standard survey template and edit it to reflect your priorities.
Survey Template (view Only) Make Your Own Copy
You can deploy this survey either in real-time in class, or by creating an ungraded quiz in Moodle using the same questions. It is also possible to import a basic, two-question survey into your Moodle; click here for instructions.
Benefits of Mid-Course Feedback
Some benefits of mid-course feedback include:
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Improving student belonging: Collecting mid-course feedback demonstrates to your students that you care about listening to their perspectives. To ensure that students feel heard, it can often be helpful to discuss the feedback with your students after you collect it. When you do so, try to discuss with them which changes you can make in response to their feedback, which changes you cannot make, and why. Knowing that their feedback is taken seriously can increase students' sense of belonging and motivation.
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Identifying and Addressing Minor Issues: By understanding student experience of a course in real-time, faculty can proactively address concerns related to course content, pacing, instructional methods, or materials. This can help mitigate the frustration of receiving end-of-semester feedback that includes descriptions of student issues you could have fixed earlier had you known about them.
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Enhancing the Learning Experience: Giving students the opportunity to reflect on what is working well for them and what could be improved gives them the opportunity to critically reflect on their learning in the course and to develop their metacognitive awareness of their learning.
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Promoting a Collaborative Classroom: Demonstrating openness to feedback fosters a culture of mutual respect and collaboration, encouraging students to take an active role in their learning journey. It also models the collaborative behavior you want your students to adopt in their projects.
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Contribute to Course Improvement: Constructive feedback can lead to small, immediate course enhancements, ultimately making the learning environment more effective for everyone. It can also inspire large changes you may want to make to the course in future semesters.
Interpreting Mid-course Feedback
Whether you sit down with the CTL director, a mentor, or a peer, we recommend that you share your feedback with someone whom you trust to keep it in perspective. (The CTL's director is available to discuss your students' feedback and your response to it in confidence. Please sign up here for a confidential consultation.) It is easy to fixate on one outlier comment, particularly a negative one. In their book Thanks for the Feedback, Doug Stone and Sheila Heen highlight three "triggers" that may keep us from learning from a piece of feedback: (1) truth ("this feedback is simply wrong"), (2) relationship ("whether or not it's true, I can't hear this feedback from you"), and (3) identity ("I'm not that kind of person"). An interlocutor can help you see past these triggers and discover patterns that your emotional response to the feedback can obscure.
Responding to Mid-course Feedback
Just as you owe it to your students to give them feedback on their graded work, you owe it to them to acknowledge their feedback on your teaching. It may very well be the case that you cannot address every one of the concerns that students raise. (This especially may be the case for TAs and CAs, who may not make adjustments to workload or expectations on their own.) That's fine—what is important is that you explain to students how and why the class is structured as it is, and that you have heard and appreciate their perspective. You may want to go so far as to share a summary of their feedback with the whole group, even showing them a graph of the distribution of responses in the event that the class seems divided on the utility of a particular activity or assignment. (It might even prove to be a valuable opportunity to stimulate their metacognition, as they appreciate for the first time why another student found an exercise useful.)