Midsemester Feedback
Gathering student feedback is a great way to find out what's working in your class and what could use some improvement. Although we recommend offering students multiple opportunities to provide input on the course, midsemester is an optimal time to conduct a formal assessment. Students are familiar with the learning environment and have a sense of their own progress. Instructors appreciate hearing about issues with sufficient time to make corrections or changes. Students appreciate the timing because they can benefit from their own comments and because the instructor has an early and improved awareness of student concerns.
Survey Options
Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ)
Instructors use the SEEQ tool to collect mid-semester feedback from their students. SEEQ is a research-based feedback form used by
more than one million respondents in diverse instructional settings. We offer this feedback tool to all Penn State instructors.
- Visit https://seeq.psu.edu
- Select the course from the list of courses for this semester.
- Click the “Schedule” button
- Enter the days they want to offer the SEEQ (default is 3 days from current date with a 7 day offering) – the system will do the rest.
- To send additional reminders to your students re-visit the above URL, select the 'Send Reminder Email'. This can be done once per day, maximum during the offering period.
- Re-visit the above URL after the offering period has ended to collect/download the results.
- Results are available for the current semester only -- they are not stored or shared with anyone other than the instructor.
Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG)
SALG is a flexible online survey sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research and allows you to choose an instrument constructed for a course similar to yours and modify it for your particular course. It also has an area for open-ended questions. The survey is delivered to students online and the sponsors provide a statistical report of the results.
Customized feedback
With a small class, you can produce a completely custom measure the old fashioned way by creating a paper survey. For some suggestions, see Examples of Teacher-Designed/Scored Feedback Questionnaires (pdf). Contact us at site@psu.edu for additional information.
Canvas
A wide variety of mid-semester feedback tools are available in Canvas Commons. We have not evaluated these surveys, but recommend reviewing any survey for items/questions that would be confusing to students, exacerbate biases, or ask about more than one aspect of a course.
