Changing Education Paradigms

Feedback From Students Becomes a Campus Staple, but Some Go Further

By TAMAR LEWIN

BOSTON — Every other Monday, right before class ends, Muhammad Zaman, a Boston University biomedical engineering professor, hands out a one-page form asking students to anonymously rate him and the course on a scale of one to five.

It asks more, too: “How can the professor improve your learning of the material?” “Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation? In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?” “How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?” “Anything else you would like to convey to the professor?”

College learning assessments and professorial ratings come in many forms, with new ones popping up all the time. Ratemyprofessors.com has been going strong for years, and almost everywhere, colleges ask students to fill out end-of-term evaluations — and increasingly, midterm evaluations as well.

Many professors with large lecture classes swear by clickers that help them keep tabs on how well their students are following the material. Some online courses include dashboards that let professors see which students are stuck, and where. And thousands of professors use some variation of K. Patricia Cross’s “One-Minute Paper” approach, in which, at the end of each class, students write down the most important thing they learned that day — and the biggest question left unanswered.

But even in an era when teacher evaluations and learning assessments are a hot topic in education, Dr. Zaman stands out in his constant re-engineering of his teaching: He graphs the results the day he collects them (an upward trend is visible), sends out an e-mail telling the class about any fine-tuning he plans in response to their comments, and starts the following class by discussing the feedback.

“A lot of college teaching is not very good, and everybody knows it,” he said. “Having student evaluations at the end of the course doesn’t do anything to help it get better, and the person who does the evaluation can never benefit. To me it just seems intuitive to ask for ratings all along.”

So why don’t all of his colleagues do it?

“Excellent question,” he said. “I know evaluations are a very loaded topic. And it’s true you have to have a thicker skin. And there’s another problem. Is the evaluation the diagnostic or the cure? If you’re a tenured professor, and you don’t care very much about your teaching, would it make any difference if you didn’t get good ratings?”

For many education experts, the idea of using a frequent feedback loop to improve teaching seems tailor-made for academia, given that even top scholars, steeped to the gills in their own discipline, may have had zero training in pedagogy.

At Columbia University’s Teachers College, Lee Knefelkamp has for decades distributed 5-by-7 cards to her students every two weeks, asking on one side, “What’s working for you?” and on the other, “Of what are you needful?”

“It’s an incredibly helpful process,” said Dr. Knefelkamp, who works to encourage professors to seek such feedback. She says it can help colleagues catch things they have overlooked, hear from shy students and spur students to reflect on their learning.

Dr. Zaman has used his own form, gathering both a numeric rating and the open-ended feedback Dr. Knefelkamp favors, since he began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, worried about how to reach his students.

“I would ask the ones who came for office hours how I was doing, and they’d say, ‘O.K.,’ ” said Dr. Zaman, who has a brother who teaches at Princeton. “I wanted to be better than that. I believe I have a contract with my students, that if they read, study and do the homework, I will do my part to help them learn.”

When he gave out his first forms, he averaged 3s. “People say that’s O.K. It’s average. But that’s like saying it’s O.K. to get a C,” he said. “It isn’t good enough.”

By the end of the term, he was up to 4s and 5s — and in 2009, the year he moved from Texas to Boston, he won the University of Texas’ highest teaching award.

“I think the evaluations show students that I care,” he said. “At Texas, I felt terrible when a student wrote that he or she was colorblind, and couldn’t understand what I was showing with all these colored chalks. Without the evaluations, I probably would never have found that out, because no one likes to talk about their disabilities.”

Dr. Zaman’s form remains generally the same for the science students in last semester’s Biotransport course, or this semester, the Honors College sophomores in the required Insight and Invention course.

The comments are sometimes off-kilter (“Nice shirts,” one student wrote; another asked, “Can we watch wrestling at the end? Please?”). Some are technical (“Some of the articles on Blackboard are sideways and it’d be nice if they were straight.”). There are pleas for more visuals, and lots of cheerleading (“Keep up the good work!”).

The class — Dr. Zaman teaches bioengineering for two months, and others, who do not use the evaluations, teach modules on law and global health — is a teaching challenge, with students from many different departments, including neuroscience and hospitality management. And while Dr. Zaman thought his first reading assignment was easy and accessible, some non-science students found it incomprehensible. He did not change the assignment — “Students don’t choose the curriculum,” he said — but began providing a list of terms and definitions.

Last week, as he outlined the challenges his lab faced in designing a pulse oximeter for use in Zambia, where there might be no electricity, no trained health professionals and no spare parts, he carefully covered the biological basics.

He began by showing a map, on which sub-Saharan Africa and other areas were highlighted, asking students what it might represent — “AIDS?” “Malaria?” and finally, correctly, “Infant mortality?” — and tossing a piece of candy to the one who guessed right.

He showed a chart on the prevalence of pneumonia and an X-ray of a lung. Then he asked whether anyone with a younger sibling who had had pneumonia knew the symptoms and how it was diagnosed — a straight path to the need for pulse oximeters to measure oxygen saturation. The professor led students through a process of designing a cheap, sturdy solar-powered oximeter and prodded them to think further: How would you do clinical trials? Were there ethical issues? Who would manufacture it? Who would distribute it?

The evaluations were complimentary: “I liked using the example of the pulse ox device as a foundation for launching the discussion so that we had a tangible example to work with instead of being more general,” one said.

Another, simply: “♥ It was good.”