Blogging Pedagogy - surveys

Surveying Perspectives

Lindsey Gay — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 13:06:54 +0000

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Lindsey Gay

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Lindsey Gay

As the semester winds down, I have been thinking about my students’ responses to my course topic. Death and dying are universal facts, but our various responses to them are far from universal. This week I asked them to complete a short, anonymous survey that summarized their individual responses to the different topics we covered and conversations we had.

This semester marks the third time I’ve taught RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Death and Dying (Summer ‘13, Fall ‘13, Spring ‘14), and it’s gone a bit differently each time. As the semester winds down, I have been thinking about my students’ responses to my course topic. Death and dying are universal facts, but our various responses to them are far from universal. As part of my students’ Learning Records, I asked them to reflect on their own perspectives on death and dying, and to chart how their perspectives or feelings change as the class progresses. “Perspectives” was in fact one of our central course strands, along with Analysis, Research, and Writing. From the very beginning, I assured my students that my goal with Perspectives was not to change their belief systems or their values, but to get them accustomed to determining where their own perspectives originate, how they are formed and influenced, what is valuable about them and why, and what influences their perspectives have in their own lives. This week I asked them to complete a short, anonymous survey that summarized their individual responses to the different topics we covered and conversations we had.

In their Learning Records, my students have often offered profound insights into their own ways of considering death and dying. They report that though they perhaps gave the subjects little or no thought prior to enrolling in this course, they have since found that death and dying are quite interesting topics. Some students realize that their views, whether liberal or traditional, were certainly not the only valuable ways of approaching these topics. Some students have been introduced to death and dying at young ages, having had siblings or parents pass away; in these cases, I have found that the individual may be either much more reluctant to enter class discussions, or much more apt to do so with the confidence that comes from personal experience.

In fact, my students this year have offered so many different perspectives on death and dying that I’ve found it hard to collate them. For my own course development skills, I wanted some way of generalizing their reactions. Were there any specific aspects of the course materials or topics that they agreed on? Did we as a group sufficiently address our Perspectives course strand--that is, did we respectfully, critically, and analytically engage our own experiences, feelings, biases, and beliefs? Admittedly, this idea came to me pretty quickly as I was looking over the day’s lesson plan, so I had to devise the survey only hour before class began. Depending on the results, I may reconsider the utility or worth of some questions.

The results (zoom in!) were interesting. Though I expected the students’ responses to the first seven questions (based on discussions during class and in their Learning Records), I found their responses to #8 unexpected. Some of our most spirited classroom discussions were about legislative or unusual issues, but those received low interest ratings. I wonder whether my ranking system (where 4 = highest interest) ended up being confusing. The responses to #9, where I asked students to tell me what they wish we’d discussed, were incredibly varied: subjects ranged from suicide, to death rituals in other cultures, to Halloween.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results. I wanted to engage the students in a slightly different medium, which an online survey accomplishes. Mostly I just wanted a way of gauging their responses that was geared directly toward the course material, as opposed to the depersonalized Course Instructor Surveys they fill out at the end of each semester. I have also been fairly confident of the rhetoric-specific material I’ve presented in class, so I left that out of the survey. I thus confined the survey to purely topical issues of death and dying, rather than issues of rhetorical skill and practice.

To Poll or Not to Poll

Jeremy Smyczek — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:12:00 +0000

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Jeremy Smyczek

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Screenshot via SurveyMonkey

*The final unit of my RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Animal Rights course features an oral presentation based around a multimedia advocacy project that each student must design. As the major part of the evaluation, I create and use online polls (using tools such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics) that the students complete in real time after every presentation. Each poll asks four trait-centered questions, followed by a holistic evaluation, allowing for a variety of data combinations to see how students respond to each other’s work. Polls can be more elaborate than this, naturally, but the point here is to capture initial impressions while the memory is still fresh.

Students are familiar with polls, of course, as they not only complete a course survey evaluating their instructors and teaching assistants, but also are asked to fill out an exit poll for a wide array of campus services. Using polls in the classroom no doubt predates computer-assisted instruction, and could certainly still be done without it, but computers provide a number of services that pencil-and-paper methods would not, such as multiple permutations and combinations of the data. They also allow for total anonymity of response, generally a good thing for any democratic evaluation.

Technological convenience aside, however, using polls in determining grades seems a subset of a larger pedagogical problem: the ethics of peer evaluation. It’s easy to anticipate a response both from students and other educators something like, “well, you’re the one getting paid here; farming out evaluation is at best lazy and at worst negligent.”

But I disagree with this, for three overlapping reasons. First, one of the central problems that we face as rhetorical educators is getting past the single-audience problem. By this, I mean the idea that the only purpose of college writing is to crack the teacher’s code, to figure out what she wants to hear, and to write it. When I tell students that the persuasive appeal of the final oral presentation is aimed at the rest of the class, online polling shows that I mean it.

Second, as Peter Elbow tells us, teachers are not the typical readers that most writing in the world encounters. Fellow students provide a diversity of perspectives and concerns that are far more representative of a typical public discourse’s audience than the one I offer. If activism is more than an academic exercise, then other voices ought to count.

Finally, students are more discerning than I would have initially thought. Sure, they grade each other a bit more kindly than I do, but ultimately the ordinal rankings that they produce in terms of best and worst performances end up looking very similar to mine. They can tell when someone hasn’t done his homework. Hearing that from a peer is, ultimately, probably a bigger stick than hearing from the teacher.

*As many of my blogging ideas do, the idea of crowd-sourced grading grew in part from a conversation with DWRL Assistant Director Beck Wise.

Mid-Term Survey on Instructor Performance

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:52:41 +0000

Author:

Matthew C. Gertken

Image Credit:

Screenshot of Survey Monkey

Teaching is an art and teachers, like other artists, run the risk of valuing their performance too highly and overlooking their faults and mistakes. But as the true artist must ever abhor complacency, and tirelessly seek new angles on his or her work to spot frailities that can be avoided or improved in future, so the true teacher must resist the allure of self-sufficiency.

Teaching, even when successful, leaves no monument but in the student's mind. After the semester ends, many students we will never see again -- and if we do, rarely will we see them exercising the skills we taught. In short, our work is generally inaccessible to retrospective critique.

The worst vein of pollution I have witnessed in the graduate student experience -- and fortunately only infrequently -- arising perhaps from a combination of little sleep, long study and public irrevelance, is a kind of condescending or (in the worst cases) deprecating attitude some instructors take toward the undergraduates they teach. As if the dearth of post-modern continental theory among the undergrads were some kind of fault, rather than a token of good health and sound mind. The truth, as many of us continually re-learn, is that most of our students are delightful people, with a variety of interests and skills, and often with a fair degree of knowledge in their chosen fields, from whom, if we listen, we may learn.

Student evaluations of teacher performance have fallen under corrosive political debates about the nature of accountability and its role in the education system. Partisanship has made some teachers cynical about teacher evaluations in a society made cynical about teachers by partisanship. And even for those of us -- many of us -- who look forward to student feedback at the end of the semester, at least some anxiety about the outcome of the surveys lurks, born of the remembrance of one or two biting critiques from the past. If only we had known of that one student's gripes earlier, we could have done more to answer them, and perhaps made the class better for everyone.

Because I recently returned to teaching after three years in a different line of work, and this semester tried for the first time teaching Rhetoric and Writing, I doubted my performance perhaps more than usual. The idea of having students participate in a voluntary mid-term survey about my teaching performance struck me as a way to get a sense of students' assessments of my job at a point in the semester when time remained to correct myself if necessary. Anonymity would secure their sincerity. I went to SurveyMonkey and, with no prior experience of the site, quickly wrote up a survey with the following three questions:

1. How specifically could the instructor in RHE306 improve?

2. Is the instructor fair in leading class and grading assignments? Are assignments and the instructor's expectations clear?

3. Is RHE 306 an effective course? Are your writing skills improving? What would you change about the course, if you could re-design it?

Of eighteen students, only seven filled out the survey. The low response probably reflects the fact that the email they received said the survey was informal and optional. And I offered no incentives for taking the survey other than my gratitude, less than a pittance considering that it must be distributed anonymously. Perhaps in future I will make the survey mandatory. Nevertheless the seven responses I received were sufficient to teach me at least two important lessons, which I shall relate.

Most of the responses, whether from students' generosity or politeness, indicated general satisfaction. In response to the second question, several students said that the instructor "is fair," "does a good job," and that "assignments are very clear." To the third question, students said that the course is "effective," "a good challenging college course that makes a student think critically," and that the "workload is not excessive." One said it was becoming "easier to sit down and write papers faster and more clear" -- a positive assessment vitiated, given the purpose of the course, only by its grammar.

The teacher's duty is to smile and move on from these niceties. The purpose of surveys lies not in replenishing a self-esteem withered from excessive exposure to the Pierian Spring. Rather it is to discover our faults that we may amend them. My students' answers to the first question served this purpose. I framed the question in a way that would force a critical response: how specifically could the instructor improve? Each of the seven students concurred generally on the need for greater clarity on assignment expectations. The instructor could improve by "stating specific objectives and requirements of certain assignments," and giving "a clearer explanation of the assignments," and providing "more example essays." Though some of these comments flatly contradicted answers in the second question, the fact that they came first gave them priority -- students must have felt no need to repeat the same criticism in question two.

This survey therefore provided me with a student consensus that I needed to provide clearer explanations, examples and expectations for assignments. Because I already devoted what I considered excessive class time to explaining assignments, "teaching for the test," I felt some annoyance after reading these comments. But upon more mature consideration, a means of resolving the problem occurred to me. It was a low-fi, low-tech solution.

The next day in class I gave a pop quiz about the requirements for the upcoming assignment. Students had received warning from time to time since the beginning of the term that I might give pop quizzes, but to this point no occasion had arisen, as I had thought to spare them. Now I gave a quiz testing their comprehension of the essay soon due. After they took the first quiz, we graded it in class, giving students a chance to ask questions and learn answers from each other. Then I told them this surprise would not count toward their grade, but that the next one would count.

Few performed well on the pop quiz. Exposing their apparent lack of attention to the details of the approaching assignment must have stung them into paying more attention, since the essay results bore a much closer resemblance to the prompt, and similarity in form to each other, than previously. Before the next essay came due, I quizzed them again. Most students performed very well on the quiz -- they had studied the assignment -- and the essay's results corroborated this evidence. Most of the students even seemed to enjoy the quiz this second time -- they seemed to relish what they viewed as earning easy points.

Thus I learned of a danger of my own teaching style -- lack of clarity, and sometimes downright confusion, about the nature of assignments -- and students learned of their responsibility to understand assignments and to ask for clarification if they do not.

I shall quote only one other student's comment in the anonymous survey: "Make the course a little more interesting. I know that's every student's dream, but that's all we can ask for a class that early." This I have attempted to do by introducing more multimedia into lesson plans than previously, though I still resist any drift toward college class as variety show.