Student Perspectives on the Dartmouth Course Assessment

Course assessments (also known as end-of-term course evaluations, student evaluations of teaching, or SETs) can serve a fundamental purpose in teaching and learning environments by opening a line of communication between students, faculty, and the institution. Course assessments can enable students to offer their perceptions on instructional effectiveness, course design, and their own learning while empowering educators to reflect on and adapt their teaching practices. For the institution, course assessments can inform curricular development, provide insight into student needs and perspectives, produce data to support faculty review and evaluation processes, and foster a culture of continuous improvement, accountability, and excellence in teaching and learning.

Like many institutions, Dartmouth established its current course assessment process more than two decades ago, and has not formally evaluated the process for effectiveness or updated its instrument since. In the meantime, research has consistently revealed that while course assessments are effective ways to gather information about student perceptions, those perceptions can be prone to subjective bias and do not on their own offer reliable measures of teaching effectiveness or student learning (Boring 2016, Carpenter 2020, Linse 2017). Joining an active community of practitioners from institutions from across the United States, DCAL and Learning Design & Innovation (LDI) staff are seeking to understand the strengths and limitations of Dartmouth's course assessment model to inform a future revision that we hope will better serve students, faculty, and the institution.

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Partnering with Palaeopitus—Dartmouth's senior society with the distinct mission of fostering understanding between students, staff, and faculty—DCAL and LDI fielded a student survey to gather input about course assessments from the undergraduate student body. The Course Assessments Student Survey generated responses from 175 students over a 6-day period at the end of May 2024. Results indicate that among respondents, 

• 52% are satisfied or very satisfied with the current course assessment process while 48% are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. 
• 77% of respondents indicated that they always complete course assessments, and a majority reported that they put a moderate amount of effort into doing so. 
• Comments reflected that students tend to put more effort into course assessments for courses that they feel strongly about–either positively or negatively.

The survey outlined a number of potential uses for course assessment data, including to help an instructor improve their teaching, to influence changes made to a course, for the administration to gauge student satisfaction with the Dartmouth curriculum, to inform faculty reappointment, promotion, or tenure decisions, and for students to view previous course assessment results in the Course Assessment Portal. Survey responses revealed that most students think course assessment data is used only minimally or moderately for any of these purposes, pointing to a lack of clarity about how course assessment data is used, and if it is used at all.

Survey responses indicate a desire among students for course assessment data to be more universally available on the Course Assessment Portal, both to inform their course selection decisions and to help future students considering taking the courses they have taken. A majority of respondents reported that they never visit the Course Assessment Portal.

Students also indicated that the course assessment questions are not aligned with the feedback they wish to provide. Respondents indicated that fewer multiple choice questions, more free-text entry fields, and more general and less specific prompts would improve the usefulness of the course assessment for them.

DCAL will pair this student input with feedback from faculty and administrators to further inform the course assessment revision effort.

Sources

1. Boring, A., Ottoboni, K., & Stark, P. (2016). Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness . ScienceOpen Research. https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/6b50c6aa-6df3-4bcb-bc8e-7460a35bae4e/ScienceOpen_Article_9343.pdf
2. Carpenter, S. K., Witherby, A., & Tauber, S. K. (2020). On students' (mis)judgments of learning and teaching effectiveness. Educational Psychology Review, 32 (4), 897-915. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09516-0
3. Linse, A. R. (2017). Interpreting and using student ratings data: Guidance for faculty serving as administrators and on evaluation committees. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54 , 94-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2016.12.002