Resources for TAs
Midquarter Evaluations
CTL offers two methods of getting feedback from your students midway through the quarter: the Small Group Evaluation (SGE) and online midquarter evaluations. Each of these methods has its particular strengths. Regardless of the evaluation choice you make, please know that our staff will be happy to consult with you about the results if desired.
Small Group Evaluation
In an SGE, a trained evaluator comes to your class during the last 20 minutes and, after you have left, divides your students into small groups. Each group comes to a consensus on what is contributing to their learning in the class, what needs improvement, and (optional) what students themselves can do to improve the course. The evaluator summarizes these responses, seeking to make them as specific as possible and to resolve or clarify contradictions among groups. The results are presented to you later in a private consultation.
Benefits of the SGE are several. Because students actively discuss and debate their ideas, the process tends to focus student comments on high priority issues and helps distinguish these from outlier, or low consensus, comments. Instructors who have used the method find the resulting information to be unusually rich, specific, and readily translatable into productive course changes. The fact that you allocate class time for this purpose reinforces your genuine interest in student feedback.
To request a small group evaluation, please fill out this online request form at least one week prior to your desired SGE date.
Online Midquarter Evaluations
Request an Online Midquarter evaluation now
CTL offers two basic online forms that allow your students to anonymously and individually provide feedback about how your course is going. The short form (see here for an example) uses open-ended language very similar to our in-class small group evaluations, while the longer form (see here for an example) uses more specific questions about particular areas of the course.
Online forms preserve class time, but often suffer from very low response rates. To encourage responses, we encourage you to send reminders to your students, and to let them know that their feedback is important to you. We recommend that you give your students a maximum of one week to fill out the evaluation.
At the end of the evaluation period, you will receive a spreadsheet with the verbatim, anonymous responses. CTL consultation is also available, in order to help you interpret the feedback and put it to good use.
In the event that you will not be provided with an endquarter evaluation as a TA, you may also request an online endquarter evaluation from us, using the same form.
To request an online evaluation, please fill out this request form at least one week prior to the date on which you would like to begin the evaluation period.