Suggestions for Presenting Data on

Student Evaluations of Instruction

 

Faculty have traditionally presented the results of students’ evaluations of their courses by listing the results in much the same way as the evaluations forms were organized. While this is often sufficient for making a case of effective teaching, especially when evaluations are uniformly excellent, other ways to organize these data can be helpful.

 

The guiding question in considering whether (and how) to reorganize course evaluation data from students is, “What do I want the data to show”. For example, if you wanted to show an improvement in student evaluations of instruction across time, it would be logical to supplement to the current year’s course evaluation summaries with data from the previous year, or several years, as shown below. By selecting the “key” item (or items), i.e., the items on the extent to which students judged the instructor was prepared, motivated them to learn and was effective in teaching the course are show in the first box below.  Or, you may want to compare your course evaluations on the key item(s) to the department mean and/or the mean of others for the same course. This is shown in the second box.

 

Data showing Improvement	Data compared to others

 

There are several other ways to organize results from course evaluations:

• Order items from highest to lowest and discuss reasons for the lower items and plans for improving those ratings.
• Reorganize course evaluation data items into clusters that reflect common topics and areas (e.g. an example based on the items on the College of Arts and Sciences course evaluation form).
• Identify several items that are tied to your Statement of Teaching Philosophical. For example, if motivating students to learn is part of your philosophy of teaching, you might highlight students’ ratings for this item.