I take my teaching seriously and I am always willing to hear from students about ways that I can improve. As a sign of this commitment, I provide a link to my reviews on ratemyprofessors.com . If you are interested in learning about me and my teaching, please read on.
I give my students the opportunity to provide their written feedback to me at exam times (midterms and final), using my own feedback instrument There are nine 5-level Likert items , with which students are invited to evaluate statements about me as the instructor, on the dimension of frequency. For example, the statement “The instructor is well-prepared for class.” can be rated as follows:
| Value | Label [implied] | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Always | very positive |
| 4 | [Mostly] | positive |
| 3 | [Sometimes] | neutral |
| 2 | [Rarely] | negative |
| 1 | Never | very negative |
The levels of each Likert item are symmetrical (equal number of positive and negative levels around the neutral centre) and balanced (there is equal perceptual distance from the centre, ‘Sometimes’, for the pairs ‘Always’ and ‘Never’ and ‘Mostly’ and ‘Rarely’)
There are also three open-ended questions that students are invited to complete.
Midterm feedback is formative (I will look at these results immediately and discuss them with my students) and final feedback is summative (I will not look at these until my grades have been submitted). The Faculty of Science also collects summative feedback about my teaching.
My goal is to post to this website all the feedback response data that I receive. I provide a numerical summary of the Likert items and I transcribe responses to each of the open-ended questions.
I compute a single number that is the percentage of agreement, over those nine Likert items, with the rating ‘Always’.