Teaching & Learning

Evaluation

Why Evaluate

Seeking feedback on the success of your teaching and the quality of students' experience is desirable for two main reasons:

  • As a professional, you have a desire (indeed an obligation) to critically reflect on your activities, to judge the quality of those endeavours, and to seek quality improvements.
  • The university is accountable to its various stakeholders – particularly its students – for the quality of learning outcomes, and unit evaluation is one important component of the University's quality assurance system.

Quality assurance and quality improvement in terms of student participation and achievements are thus the reasons for evaluation.

What to Evaluate

This will depend on the purpose of the evaluation – whether it be for course and/or teaching improvement (now, or for the next time the unit is offered), benchmarking against certain standards, or some other defined purpose.

Defining the purpose will determine the focus of your evaluation, which might include:

  • The impact of ones' teaching
  • The effectiveness of course design, including its content and assessment methods
  • Adequacy of student support (academic, technical, administrative)
  • Course delivery matters (e.g. with respect to web delivery).

When to Evaluate

In one sense, this question can be answered with 'all the time'. As teachers, we are continually gathering feedback informally and responding to, and adjusting, our teaching accordingly. However, such data tends to be gathered in an ad-hoc fashion, anecdotal and fleeting.

We therefore need to complement informal evaluation with more formal (i.e., structured and planned) evaluation.

Decisions on when to formally evaluate a unit depend on numerous factors, such as:

  • At what stage the unit is in with respect to its development cycle. For example, it's often prudent to evaluate a unit that has been offered for the first time
  • The last time the unit was reviewed
  • Faculty/School requirements, and review schedules
  • The purpose of the evaluation. There are two general types of evaluation based on their timing:
    • Formative evaluation – carried out during the course of teaching, and largely for diagnostic purposes – i.e. checking the unit's progress, and making adjustments accordingly
    • Summative evaluation – carried out at the completion of the unit, and largely for judgemental purposes – i.e. the extent to which unit aims and objectives have been achieved, and certain standards reached.

    Findings from both can inform quality improvements for the next teaching period.

Summative (end-of-semester) evaluations are also required by faculty for quality assurance reporting purposes (see University of Tasmania Course Design and Delivery Policy). Unit Surveys can be used as a part of the summative evaluation process.

How to Evaluate

Evaluation should involve gathering data from a range of sources, over a period of time. These sources and types of data include:

  • your students and their work using:
    • surveys and questionnaires during and at the end of the semester
    • focus groups meetings or individual interviews
    • discussion board forums and topics
    • assessment submissions
    • levels and type of interaction in MyLO
  • assessment results (overall and for each task)
  • completion rates
  • formal and informal feedback from other teaching and support staff involved in the unit
  • colleagues via peer review of teaching
  • your own records (e.g., self evaluation, log books)
  • higher education literature
  • use an internal (UTAS) review, or put your unit up for a full review with international recognition

The method(s) chosen will depend on the sorts of data you wish to collect, which will in turn hinge upon the purposes of the evaluation. Generally you will wish to collect both qualitative and quantitative information.

Knowledge of different methods for evaluating your teaching and the implications of quality assurance for teaching practice are elements of core knowledge [K5, K6] included within the Advance HE Professional Standards Framework.

Unit Surveys gather largely quantitative data, with added scope for student comments.