Formative evaluations

Formative feedback/evaluation enables you to check how well your teaching is contributing to student learning.   There is no one way to get feedback on your teaching – it is your choice what you focus on and how you find out about it.

Keep these points in mind:

• Start with techniques that are quick and easy to use
• Implement incremental and sustainable changes
  
• Use more than one technique to reach a broader range of students
• Make sure that if you adapt a technique, that doing so doesn't undermine its original purpose
• Let your students know what you have learned from their feedback and what you might change as a result (‘close the loop’).  

Getting formative feedback on your teaching has enormous benefits for your teaching practice and for your students’ learning. It is designed and owned by you, so it can be flexible and answer to your needs. It can reveal much about your teaching that summative feedback cannot and that, if addressed, can have a real impact on student learning.

Students are likely to believe that teachers who use formative evaluation are committed to improving their teaching and achieving good outcomes for students. Also, involving students in evaluation can model reflective practice and signal the importance of evaluation as a skill, and may contribute to better response rates in summative evaluations (e.g. SET).

The University values and recognises excellent teachers through career advancement and teaching awards. Practising formative evaluation can demonstrate that you are always looking to enhance and develop your teaching. 

Formative evaluation is gathered during a course, ideally from as early as the third week of teaching (but before the tenth week) to enable you to incorporate the feedback directly into the course. It should be an ongoing process, building at each step on what you have learned to enhance and/or develop your teaching.

The most important thing to do with formative evaluation is to summarise the feedback and explain how you will respond to it. Students appreciate their feedback being taken seriously.

Keep a record of your response as evidence of your reflective practice – it will prove valuable as you develop your formative evaluation practice and when you want to provide evidence of your teaching effectiveness.

A formative evaluation survey is only one of many methods of obtaining formative feedback from your students.  

If you are interested in using this method and it is appropriate for your course, suggested options for conducting a formative evaluation survey are available through either a Canvas quiz or by using the Qualtrics survey tool  Visit the following page on the Staff Intranet to learn about setting up your formative evaluation survey.