 What is the purpose of student evaluations?
Evaluations should provide useful feedback that will help you identify strengths and weaknesses and improve your teaching. When you seek an academic position, you may very well be asked to provide a summary of your past evaluations.
When should I distribute evaluation forms?
You should discuss this with the professor and with any other TAs in the class. Some suggestions:
- immediately following a guest lecture, and/or
- at midterm, to give you time to improve
- at the end of the term, perhaps after the final exam so as not to take class time
Be sure to have someone (another TA or a student in the class) collect your end-of-term evaluations and turn them in to Pamela in 406. You may view them after course grades have been submitted, but not before.
Do I need to use the standard Arts and Sciences evaluation form?
All TAs for lecture and lab courses are now routinely evaluated using the new online Arts and Sciences course evaluation form. There are 8 multiple-choice and one open-ended question related to TAs on this form. The open-ended question simply states "Comments for TA effectiveness." These questions may not provide you with the most useful feedback, so you should think about other questions you might want to ask.
Where can I find evaluation forms to adapt for my particular TAship?
Click here to download a pdf file containing five evaluation forms used by psychology TAs in previous years.
The Derek Bok Center has examples of several kinds of forms that can be adapted to fit just about any kind of TAship. See
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~bok_cen/docs/EvalnForms.html
For midterm feedback, those of you who are teaching lab or discussion sections will find the form on the following Berkeley site useful. It has a large set of
questions from which you can choose. This is part of a larger web site where you'll find tips for improving your teaching in any area in which
you are weak.
http://teaching.berkeley.edu/compendium/appendixa.html
Can I use CourseWorks to solicit student feedback?
Yes. The "Test and Quiz" section of CourseWorks can be
used to solicit and collate anonymous feedback. This might be particularly useful for
section leaders. To learn how to use it, download the Test and Quiz Quick
Start Guide at
http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/services/courseworks/guides.html
and take a look at the first example on
http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/services/courseworks/exemplary_sites/
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