Informal feedback questionnaires

For more information contact: Toby Hall.

Lecturers are asked to use some form of informal feedback "mini-questionnaire" in each of their modules early in the semester (around the end of week 2 or the start of week 3). These are to enable students to give feedback on their modules at an early enough stage to make a difference in the way that they're taught.

Students have commented that they will appreciate it very much if you spend a couple of minutes in a subsequent lecture summarising the results of the feedback and any changes you may make as a result. If appropriate, you could consider using a further questionnaire a couple of weeks later to determine whether students feel such changes have had the intended benefits.

There is no formal procedure for these questionnaires, and lecturers should decide on an appropriate format, design the questionnaire, consider the results, and provide any necessary feedback to students, in whatever way they think is most appropriate for their module.

For modules with relatively few students, a paper questionnaire which asks for numerical responses to a small number of statements is feasible: a sample questionnaire can be downloaded in word or pdf format.

For modules with more students, a large stack of sheets of paper with numbers circled isn't likely to be very useful, and it may be better to consider one of the following options (which could, of course, also be used for small modules):

• Using a paper questionnaire which prompts students for written comments. Here is an example used by Lasse Rempe.
• Using clickers or Socrative makes it possible to ask students questions during a lecture and get an instant summary of their responses.
• A more low-tech way of getting instant responses during lectures is to say something like "this side of the board means you can't hear me at all, this side of the board means I'm shouting, put your hand up when I reach the appropriate point", and then walking across the blackboard while watching student responses. Doing this for each of two or three questions may well be the easiest way to get feedback from large classes.
• VITAL has a survey tool which enables you to set up a questionnaire for students to complete outside of lectures, and will provide you with a summary of the results. Here are some instructions: Rachel Bearon and Martyn Hughes have experience of using this tool.
• If you just want to allow students to make text comments about the module, you could set up a blog in VITAL and direct them to it. This is straightforward to do (User Tools->Blogs->Create Blog), and it is possible to allow students to make anonymous comments.