Student Evaluations

The most important thing students can receive from their teachers is feedback. Information can come from many sources, but useful and constructive feedback is something that can only come from an expert.

Unfortunately, grades provide very little useful information on their own. Condensing an entire semester of work into a single number is often misleading, providing little information on how well the student did and no information on how to improve. Does a "B" grade mean that a student had great trouble and worked hard? That he or she could have done better but slacked off? Did the student learn a lot, or was he or she familiar with the material from the beginning? All we know is "B", and even most teachers will admit that they need more context to know what a grade given by another teacher really means.

Worse, research indicates that when students are given grades and written feedback, the feedback is ignored. Simply including a "comments" section on the final grades will not be an effective way to give students direction and an understanding of their own work. A different system is needed

There are many different possible methods for evaluating students' work beyond the A-F grading system. Students can receive grades specific to different areas of their work, including effort and "gain" over the term. Purely written feedback ("narrative evaluations") have been used with some success in many different institutions across the country. We are still investigating the most effective way to provide feedback to our students.