Student Guide on End-of-Term Course Feedback Surveys

End-of-Term Course Feedback Surveys (ETCFS) allow students to provide anonymous feedback on their formal educational experiences. The primary purpose of the surveys is to help instructors better understand how students experience courses and how courses may be enhanced in the future. Most instructors review survey results regularly and use them to inform changes (sometimes small, sometimes more substantive) to their courses over time. Thus, feedback is most helpful when students provide specific, concrete feedback.

ETCFS results also may be used in other ways. University administrators (department chairs, program directors, and academic deans) may use them to better understand how students experience particular instructors and courses over time and/or how students experience their curriculum across courses in their academic units. In addition to supporting an instructor’s development as a teacher, ETCFS results also may be used as one small part of an instructor’s annual performance evaluation, their tenure and/or promotion evaluation, and/or nominations for teaching awards.

One final note about context: when you begin a Blue survey, you’ll see a few questions about yourself – questions about things like what motivated you to take a course, whether you had the background you needed prior to the course, how you prepared for and engaged in the course, and so on. You might be wondering why we ask these questions, since they’re about you, not about the course or the instructor. The answer is twofold: such questions can foster more reflective feedback on instruction, and your responses help readers better understand the context of specific survey results.

 

 

The majority of the questions in the ETCFS are about your experience in/of the course. You’ll see questions about specific aspects of a course’s design and specific instructor behaviors. These questions are derived from the research on effective teaching, course design, and learning environments.

You’ll notice the survey does not ask you how you feel about a course. Why not? Because this is not a satisfaction survey. Instead, it’s a survey meant to capture information about the specific aspects of the course and instruction that, from your perspective, supported your learning/achievement of the course outcomes.

In addition to closed-ended items that provide scaled response options, you’ll also see open-text items that give you an opportunity to provide concrete suggestions for ways the course might be improved. These items can provide instructors with some of the most useful feedback in the survey, assuming students take the time to reflect thoughtfully on particular aspects of their experience in a course.

Reflection is a hallmark of Jesuit education. It’s also a fundamental commitment to responsible participation in course feedback surveys. Just as you want your instructors to be reflective when providing feedback on your course assignments, we ask you to approach this feedback opportunity as an act of Ignatian reflection. 

So, what does this mean? Ignatian reflection is a meaning-making exercise – an opportunity to review experiences, notice the details and texture of those experiences, and identify the learning and growth that has come from those experiences.

Before you go into Blue to complete a course feedback survey, then, you are encouraged to review/remind yourself of the following: 

• The syllabus and/or course calendar, especially the units or topics covered and the activities and assignments completed along the way
• The “light bulb” moments you experienced, where you learned something new or something finally “clicked” for you
• Any struggles you may have had, including moments when the learning was more difficult, and the activities/content that helped you move past them
• What you knew (or thought or believed) about the course and its content at the beginning of the term, and how you understand the course/content now
• The specific actions taken by the instructor that supported your learning and/or engagement in the course

Reflection need not be labor-intensive. Even spending just a few minutes reflecting on your experience in a course can better prepare you to provide useful feedback.

Action is at the heart of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm – and, indeed, the whole point of any learning process. Action also is a key element of the course feedback process because the primary purpose of ETCFS is to inform possible actions an instructor might take in future versions of a course.

As you reflect on your experience in a given course, try to pinpoint concrete actions you took in your own learning process, actions the instructor took during the course, and actions the instructor could take in the future to support student learning in the course. Feedback that is grounded in examples of concrete actions will be of greatest benefit to your instructors and to future SLU students.

Once you’re ready to complete a course feedback survey, consider carefully the specific actions each question is asking about. When responding to open-text questions, try to offer as specific feedback as possible, rather than vague comments. (These tips from the University of Michigan provide examples of less helpful and more helpful comments.)

One final note about focusing on action: when you do this, you’re much less likely to bring implicit biases into your responses. As you’ll read at the start of the Blue ETCFS, research has shown that student feedback on courses is often influenced by unconscious and unintentional biases about instructors. For example, women and instructors of color systemically receive less positive student feedback than white men – even when there are no actual differences in the instruction or in what students have learned.

Therefore, when you focus on the specific actions your instructor has taken in the course – reading each survey item carefully and responding to exactly what is being asked – you reduce the likelihood that those unconscious biases will shape your responses. This is a concrete way you can help to make teaching at SLU more just and equitable for all instructors, regardless of their perceived identity(ies), age, appearance, personality, or national origin. 

When you engage in Ignatian reflection, evaluation is built in – an essential step in reflecting on your experiences, the actions you’ve taken, and the actions your instructor has taken, all with an eye toward possible enhancements for the future. When the ETCFS asks you to provide suggestions for improving the course, it’s asking you to reflect on how well things have gone and on specific actions that could enhance learning for future students.

Through an Ignatian lens, evaluation should be offered in a constructive way, grounded in a focus on the instructor’s actions. When students criticize an instructor in personal terms, or voice complaints without connecting those complaints to specific actions, instructors can’t really act on the feedback.