Midterm student feedback becomes a source of evidence for others' assessment of teaching when you provide documentation of the feedback, describe how you responded to students at the time, and explain how your students' feedback has contributed to your teaching effectiveness.
Assessing Your Teaching with Midterm Feedback
How to Design Midterm Feedback
Many instructors regularly collect midterm student feedback in order to hear their students’ perspectives on what helps them learn. As an instructor, you are the audience for this feedback, and what you learn is between you and your students.
Midterm feedback can be collected in-person during class. The Center for Teaching offers ideas and examples of effective approaches for getting helpful feedback from students on learning and experiences in your course. Center for Teaching staff will also visit your class to conduct a Classroom Assessment by Student Interview (CLASSI) session with your students.
Midterm feedback can also be collected online using a variety of tools including Qualtrics or other tools built into ICON, Zoom, and other instructional technologies available to UI students and instructors. The Midterm SPOT Check is useful for instructors who want to ask the same questions that students are asked on the end-of-semester SPOT form. The midterm SPOT Check is optional and confidential. It is administered through the SPOT system, but responses are available only to the instructor who requests the feedback.
Opening a Dialogue
Opening a Dialogue
One essential element of midterm feedback is responding to students after you have reviewed their responses. Many instructors have observed that acknowledging student feedback is a valuable opportunity to demonstrate responsiveness to student concerns, and not acknowledging their feedback can be more de-motivating for students than not asking for feedback at all. Acknowledgements to students are most effective when you:
- Thank students for taking time to provide constructive feedback,
- Acknowledge student recognition of what’s going well for them in the course,
- Identify student feedback that will help shape your teaching during the remainder of the course, and
- Clarify purposes or provide additional support in areas where you’re not able to make changes students have suggested.
If you are interested in learning more about getting constructive midterm feedback from students in your course, contact the Center for Teaching to consult on strategies for collecting and interpreting midterm feedback and the best ways to respond to students.
If you are planning to share your midterm feedback with someone else who is assessing your teaching, the Center for Teaching offers resources on ways to approach writing a narrative summary of what you learned from the feedback and how you used it.