TOOLKIT 2

FEEDBACK METHODS

1About this toolkit

This toolkit can be used by a variety of class reps, teaching staff and school management.

It aims to help you:

  1. Consider various informal feedback processes, such as focus groups
  2. Consider the effectiveness and potential enhancements of the Student Course Evaluation Form (SCEF)
  3. Reflect upon the engagement of students in student-staff liaison committees

2Focus groups

Focus groups are a great way of getting student views on either a wide variety of issues or on specific topical questions. Consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of the following as facilitators of focus groups in classes within your school:

Staff / Student
The same course / Class lecturer or tutor / Class rep
A different but related course / Lecturer or tutor from another course within the school / Class rep from another course within the school
Neutral / Administrator or head of school / School Convener or students’ association officer

Next, think about some of the following formats for a focus group.

Class-based discussions – taking an occasional 15 or 20 minutes after class to have a group discussion about what comments students have about their learning experience, with comments being taken on board by staff.

Using the Personal Response System – in a lecture room equipped with PRS, conduct quick surveys with classes. These could be a large number of questions, or one or two after each lecture. These could focus on how much students have understood subjects, how well they are finding their own personal study/work on an issue, or whether they would like to see improvements in particular areas of the learning experience.

The student learning experience – using the following diagram from the sparqs HE class rep training, ask focussed questions about each area of the student learning experience, so that students can be encouraged to be specific and targeted rather than general in their comments.

For instance, under “learning resources and their deployment” you could ask for views about the library facilities, reading lists, IT access, or equipment and materials used in the course.

Under “assessment and achievement”, you could ask questions about students’ favoured methods of assessment or their views on the feedback given on assessed work.

This would also work well as a group discussion, where students are encouraged to write down positive and negative points against each part of the diagram on post-it notes.

3Informal and alternative methods of engagement

This section will contain examples of some informal and alternative methods of engagement, including ones that have been developed by sparqs and institutions around Scotland that are different or unusual, and also draw on the advantages of informal feedback.

  • Sharing tutor perspectives – through work with sparqs in 2008-09, AberdeenUniversity’s School of Social Science will be paying teaching assistants to meet together in each module to share the informal observations of students they have picked up in tutorials. These observations will be fed into the course review process at the end of the academic year, and allows for informal comments to be captured without students being involved in a process that formalises or clarifies them.
  • Develop a wiki for your course – ask students to write a wiki page, collaborating together to describe the course, including both its strengths and potential areas for improvement. This could be a descriptor made available to potential students too.
  • Writing letters to future students – ask your class to write a letter to next year’s cohort about a module or course. Ask them to start with the words “I wish I’d known at the start that…” Publish some helpful extracts in the course handbook, prospectus or school website.

4 Your SCEF form

Part B of the SCEF form is set by individual schools to help them ask specific questions, while part A is university-wide questions.

Here are some ideas to consider in making your SCEF more effective, which you could use before, during or after its completion by students:

  1. Ask class reps to give comments on its design, format and proposed time/method of completion.
  2. Investigate possibilities of using both online and paper-based responses
  3. Give up to two weeks’ notice of the form being circulated
  4. Ask class reps to get involved in promoting the form in class
  5. Consider using tutorial time to allow students to fill in their forms together, with the tutor explaining more about the questions and the information being sought (this is being trialled by the school of social science at the university)
  6. Ensure the class rep or another student is involved in taking in all the evaluation forms, and that they hand them into the school office and not directly to the lecturer, to ensure full anonymity and security of the responses
  7. Accompany the form with a handout or verbal presentation describing how previous feedback was used, and what has been enhanced as a result of comments.
  8. Involve class reps in the analysis of the data and the construction of the subsequent report.

5 Alternative models of SCEFs

Here are two models of feedback form that can be used.

  1. Use a simple form that relies less on quantitative data and more on qualitative reflection. For instance, the form could simply ask three questions:
  2. What did you enjoy about the module?
  3. What would you improve about this module?
  4. What did you learn from this module?

Advantages of this model are:

  • Short and simple: students can write as little or as much as they like.
  • By not being able to simply tick boxes or enter numbers, they are encouraged to write more than they would in an “any other comments” box.
  • The form seeks solutions from students (“what would you improve…”) and not just criticisms, embedding the idea of students as responsible partners in shaping the curriculum and not simply demanding customers.
  • The form allows students to write about what they see as a priority, and not be forced to give comment on a range of details (eg library, computer provision) about which they have unremarkable or neutral comments. If they feel strongly about something, they’ll write as much.
  • Although this model is more resource-intensive in terms of analysing data, it should allow for richer and more useful feedback.
  1. Ask students for their views on the 8 heading areas, from the sparqs Higher Education core class representative training:

Again, consider using answers that seek qualitative data rather than quantitative.

5The Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC)

As this slide outlines, SSLCs are at the heart of your school’s learning, teaching and quality processes. As a group, decide what best describes your SSLCs…

  1. Opportunity – students have the opportunity to go to meetings.
  2. Attendance – students turn up regularly.
  3. Engagements – students actually engage in the meeting and its discussion points.

Next, have a look at the issues above – categorise each of them according to:

  1. We discuss these issues at our SSLCs
  2. We don’t discuss them, but we could consider it
  3. We don’t discuss them, and we are unlikely to

6Self-assessment on your SSLCs

This short exercise will allow you to rate your SSLC on a scale of 1 to 5 as follows:

  1. Poor
  2. Below average
  3. Satisfactory
  4. Good
  5. Excellent

Have a read of these examples, and give your school a score out of 5 – 1, 3 or 5 if your practice matches those described, or 2 or 4 if you find yourself in between two options. Think of what good ideas might be worth considering.

1 / 3 / 5
Convening SSLCs / A member of academic staff convenes the meetings, because they are best suited to chairing such discussions. If students show willing then they can take the minutes from the meetings. / Because we believe in the principle that our staff-student meetings should be student-led, we ask that a course rep chairs the meeting (usually a final year rep). A volunteer rep also takes the minutes, / We believe that the meeting is about creating a shared understanding of the learning experience. If students opt for a student convener (which they are particularly encouraged to do if studying in honours courses), support is provided by an academic co-convener. Like other groups within the school, minutes are taken by a clerk.
SSLC agenda / We believe the best way of empowering students is to ask them to develop the agenda themselves, so that the meetings reflect their concerns and problems. Usually we find that the students do this in the first 5 minutes of the meeting. / Our agenda follows a standard template for each meeting which allows for additions. This allows students from different modules or years the chance to feedback issues from their classmates. This tends to produce a list of problems. / The agenda is flexible and is agreed by the student convenor and the academic convenor. In addition to the items raised by student representatives, topics of current importance to students and staff are included, for example, feedback on assessment or our VLE. On occasion the institution suggests topics and provides resources.
SSLC actions / Where we can we attempt to follow up student suggestions. We often feel however that there is little we can do because most student comments relate to things we cannot change, or are required to do, by the university or school / We take the issues raised and outstanding to the departmental meeting or pass them onto the appropriate service area, committee or senior manager. We e-mail student representatives with the replies when we receive them. Outstanding issues are then discussed at the subsequent meeting. / All action are clearly identified and assigned in the minute of the meeting. Our year representatives are also members of departmental committees and are encouraged to lead discussion on the outstanding issues from staff-student meetings at the appropriate departmental group.
Feeding back / We publish the minutes of the staff-student meetings and put them on our notice board and website. Students are expected to provide feedback on issues of class or year concern to their peers. / A week after the meeting the student and academic convenor send out a joint e-mail to all students within the department listing the issues raised in the meeting. Leaving this e-mail a week allows us time where possible to indicate what action has been taken by staff. / We send an e-mail to all students as a means of collecting additional feedback on 1 or 2 questions. We also hold a social event for students at the end of the year which we use as an opportunity to tell students how we will enhance their learning next year.

Now have a think of this checklist – does your school do all of these?

  1. Give representatives advance notice of any meetings
  2. Give out paperwork in advance so that representatives can prepare for the meetings
  3. Invite and encourage representatives to feed any points into the agenda
  4. Give out a series of questions or topics that students can use in advance of the meeting to generate discussions with their peers
  5. Consider if it would be useful if representatives took on the role of meeting Chair or minute taker
  6. Show representatives how their involvement in previous meetings has contributed towards improvements on the course/department

7 Closing the feedback loop

Teaching staff often suggest to sparqs that it is hard to find the right time to ask for and receive informal feedback – modules are relatively short in length, and it is hard to get students to think about issues and pass comment in time for anything to be done about it.

This can be illustrated by plotting a graph, with the of feedback on one axis and the time elapsed over the module on the other.

Staff, for example, may feel that the best time to received feedback and act on it is around the middle of the module: plenty teaching has occurred but there are still several weeks before the end (see below). If this is not the same for students, then there will be difficulties in feedback being given at a time when it can be acted upon by staff.

How would you plot staff and student expectations of feedback on the above graph? Use the blank graph on the previous page.

“You said, we did” – this is a key part of a good feedback culture, in that the school is able to tell students what happens to the feedback they give. It can be used when updating classes, posting information on VLEs, or as content of posters. It can be a great way of convincing students that constructive criticism:

  1. is allowed, and indeed encouraged
  2. works

For instance, if students ask for more copies of core texts to be put in the library, and this is achieved, then you could design a poster that says “You said: there should be more [module name] core texts in the library. We provided them.”

Of course, sometimes student suggestions can’t be done, perhaps for resourcing or time reasons. Nonetheless, feedback on this is still necessary because students will very often be entirely happy with the explanation.

Consider the following flow diagram with every piece of feedback you receive:

Request or suggestion received
↓
Consideration by SSLC, staff or other committee. Can this be done?
↓ / ↓
Yes / No
↓ / ↓
Implement change / Can another similar alternative be developed or implemented?
↓ / ↓ / ↓
Publicise: “You said… we did…” to current students, and next year’s too / /
Yes
/ / No
/ /
↓
/ / ↓
/
Implement change
/ / Inform all students of feedback suggestion and reasons for non-implementation

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