Collecting Immediate Feedback on Your Teaching

To collect immediate feedback (IF) from students at the end of a class or other session, many faculty members are using a simple procedure first used in 1966:

End the class five minutes early and ask students to respond to two questions:

The process of answering these questions will (a) help students to ask themselves extremely valuable questions (what have I learned; what do I need to learn now) and (b) provide instructors with enormously valuable feedback. Sometimes instructors discover that students are drawing conclusions quite different from the ones intended. Some instructors begin the next session with responses to the patterns that emerge, or make adjustments in the way they teach or in explanations they make.

Some professors like to add an additional question occasionally, or substitute it for the second question:

That question can also stimulate students to think more deeply about their own thinking and why they think what they do.

Traditionally, students have submitted their responses on paper, often with no names attached.  In recent years, some professors have occasionally asked students to submit their responses on-line, using something like the Nicenet site to do so.

Ken Bain