Exploring students' willingness to provide feedback: A mixed methods research on end-of-term student evaluations of teaching

Abstract

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) are one of the most consistently administered tools to assess teaching performance in higher education institutions. SET affect the careers of individuals (summative evaluation), and have potential to shape the quality of instruction (formative evaluation). Past studies have addressed several issues with SET, but few have focused on surveying and interviewing students to better understand how they navigate and complete these evaluations. Therefore, a mixed methods design was used to explore university students' willingness to provide feedback through SET as part of the teaching evaluation process. Results indicate students’ positive views about the evaluation process and their perception of usefulness of evaluations increased their willingness to provide feedback, whereas potential student biases decreased their willingness to provide feedback. More importantly, results also highlight students are still not aware of, and do not really understand, the implications of their SET responses.

Keywords

• Student evaluations of teaching
• Course evaluations
• Teacher evaluations
• Higher education
• Mixed-methods research