Mid-semester Feedback

Offering your students an opportunity to provide you with anonymous feedback before the end of the semester will allow you to adjust your teaching during the course, improving your students’ experience. Additionally, research has also shown that instructors who solicit and respond to midsemester feedback from students tend to receive higher end-of-semester ratings from students than those who do not.

Midsemester feedback can take many forms, including simple ones like start/stop/continue or the four-question model. Other instructors might focus on particular aspects of the course, such as classroom climate.

Here, we include links to several midterm evaluation forms used by Trinity faculty: sample form 1, sample form 2, sample form 3, and sample form 4. If you write your own, you might look into best practices for midterm student feedback or listen to this podcast from  Teaching in Higher Ed on Eliciting and Using Student Feedback. Some key tenets to keep in mind are that students are most likely to be candid when given the opportunity for anonymous feedback and that it is critical to give students a timely response to the feedback you receive, explaining what you will change, what you won’t change, and your rationale for these decisions.

To administer the evaluations, you may choose to use a paper form, particularly if your class is small and you are using a format that requires minimal writing. Alternatively, you can use the Moodle Feedback activity to request anonymous responses from students.