As promised: Reflections on my teaching evaluations

First of all, I want to express a sincere thanks to all of the students that took the time to complete the teaching evaluations for my courses. I very much appreciate the feedback that I get from students, and I genuinely value that students in my courses are helping me become a better teacher.

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I've presented the quantitative results from my course evaluations above, and to provide some context I've also presented previous evals for the same courses when I have taught them before. If you squint, here is what you might see:

1. My evals are improving! Yay! On my job performance review, which the University of Toronto calls "Progress Through the Ranks" (not at all intimidating) my department indicated they want to see my evals improve, but I'm pretty pleased with the progress I've made since coming to U of T.
2. Students don't love my projects, assignments and exams. This one is tough, because I work really hard on my assignments but I'm also constrained on the amount of support I get to assess coursework. However, I can see that in Psy372 my projects, assignments and exams are rated very well. Taking my cue from this course, I am trying something new in Psy270 this year, incorporating several reflective writing assignments throughout the semester instead of one big assignment. It will provide more opportunity to practice writing, and it takes the pressure off of one big writing assignment that doesn't make room for improvement. In Psy280, I will also include a scaffolding assignment this year. This is a smaller, lower-weighted assignment that will prepare students for the essay they write near the end of the semester. I will also continue with the in-class worksheets that I started using last semester. The comments from the evals indicated students really liked them... However, I'm not sure students see these as projects or assignments. I think they are, but it's tough to know how students are reading the course eval questions. Thoughts?
3. I am enthusiastic for the material I teach. Totes bro! I love the courses I have been assigned, all for different reasons, but I really am very lucky to have found this career. When I was growing up, I liked sharing facts. "Did you know...." was always coming out of my mouth. It is serendipity that I've turned this into a paying gig!
4. Something went slightly awry in winter 2014 section of Psy270 (when you compare it with the fall section).

From the comments across my courses, I see that I talk too fast. I eternally endeavor to  slow down my rate of speech, both in life and in lectures. I think I will ask for help from students by telling my classes that asking questions slows me down, and simply pointing out that I'm talking really fast is also helpful.

I revised the slides in all of my courses this year, and the feedback was mixed. I had some feedback last year regarding my slides, suggesting they were not effective. I spent part of the summer investigating best practices for slide design based on empirical evidence from the cognitive and education literatures (c.f. Kalyuga, Chandler & Sweller, 1999; Mayer, 2008; Tangen, Constable, Durrant, Teeter, Beston & Kim, 2011). Some students loved the slides, other students hated them. In particular, students who disliked the slides felt like the lack of text meant they had to write too many notes in class. However, research has consistently shown that students who take notes in class perform better on assessments (Knight & McKelvie, 1985; Peper, 1986). As such, this is one of those areas where I am satisfied to take slight lower ratings in order to increase student learning. However, I think I can do a better job of explaining to students what I'm doing with the slides. I can also gentle indicate that my approach to slides is not something I am going to change just to appease some students' preferences.

There is a theme that students, especially in Psy270 don't think my exams are fair. I actually disagree. I use a lot of objective metrics to evaluate my exams, and I think they are fair. I will be writing a dedicated blog post on this in the future (closer to midterms), so I will come back to explaining those metrics then. However, one again I think I can do a better job of explaining that to students. I have be re-writing my lectures for Psy270, and that includes defining what critical thinking is, and then pointing out to students where it appears in lecture and on the exams. In using the reflective writing assignments, I have freed up some time for the TAs so that I can re-introduce a short-answer section on the exams. I think explaining that I take a lot of time and care in creating my exams, coupled with some opportunity for students to be creative on exams, will help with this.

But the winter section of Psy270 went awry for other reasons. I think there were two factors: (1) the room was terrible - it was hot, loud, and the seats were horribly uncomfortable, and (2) I put lecture recordings on line, and more than half the class stopped coming to lectures. I have indicated to room bookings that I will not take the same lecture theater again, and I'm not going to put up lecture recordings. I'm also going to use participation points to motivate students to come to lecture, so this should be less of a problem. It was clear from the comments that students who used the recordings as a substitute for coming to lecture had difficulty covering the material on their own. This also showed up in the course grade distribution - it was hugely bimodal. One group had a mean in the high 70s, while the other group had a mean in the mid-60s.

Finally, the comments and ratings show that most students recognize my enthusiasm for the material, my enthusiasm for teaching, and the fact that I genuinely care about my students in terms of both their success and well-being. The positive comments far outweighed the negative or critical comments I received, and that is really meaningful to me.

My only serious concern about my teaching evaluations is the level of participation. In all of my courses, the average evaluation completion rate is around 50%. That means that half of my students aren't telling me what they liked and didn't like about my courses, and there is a serious possibility that the above themes are obscuring the the components of my courses that could really use improving. I am going to try some things this year to encourage participation, and I would really love it if I could get the completion rate closer to 80%. That's a huge difference, but I'm up for the challenge!