An Abbreviated History

TEACHING & LEARNING: SEEKING USEFUL FEEDBACK FROM STUDENTS

An Abbreviated History . . .

Why bother? Acquiring feedback on your teaching can help you . . .

An Abbreviated History

In 2002, Dr. Carrie MacMillan chaired a committee on student evaluation of teaching at Mount Allison. As a result of the committee’s recommendations, and after a visit by Dr. Chris Knapper from Queen’s, a pilot project was run in Spring 2003 using a teaching evaluation form developed at Queen’s University (QUEST).

QUEST, a machine-readable form, contains 11 core questions, and the professor can choose additional questions from a question bank; these questions are scored numerically. There is room for narrative responses from students to provide formative data.

Several things impeded the adoption of QUEST:

Cost— Mount Allison would have to purchase the rights from Queen’s
Equipment— Mount Allison does not own a Scantron machine
Labour and time— Who would compile the narrative responses?

The current Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning, eager to follow up—albeit three years later—on the 2002 report, found SEEQ to be an attractive alternative to the Queen’s form and was impressed by the confidence already invested in SEEQ: it has been used by more than a million students in 50,000 courses worldwide.

Furthermore, SEEQ has many of the features of QUEST, including core questions, question bank, and narrative sections, but SEEQ provides more helpful detail to the instructor. Since, it is in the public domain, there are no fees—and Mount Allison has obtained permission from Dr. Herbert Marsh, its creator, to use it.