Using evaluation techniques to improve your students’ learning

 Watch the following video on SoTL evaluation.

Transcript [pdf, 210KB] Links to an external site.

Evaluating your teaching and your students’ learning helps you to reflect on how to improve student learning. Evaluation is part of what you do as a scholarly teacher. In this section we make reference to the work of Light, Cox and Calkins Links to an external site. (2009), and provide an overview of several evaluation techniques that can be used to provide more and different feedback from that of the end-of-semester unit evaluations organised by our universities. This is not an all-inclusive list of evaluation techniques. Your university might provide resources on evaluating your teaching, so talk with a colleague from your central learning and teaching unit.

Light et al. (2009) begin their chapter on evaluation by reminding us that while evaluation can be anxiety provoking, it does allow us to be constructive; it allows us to improve. They also highlight the need for evaluation to be thoughtfully designed and derived from multiple sources.

When we design ways to evaluate our teaching or student learning, the choice of evaluation strategy will be influenced by our reason for doing the evaluation, the subject of the evaluation, the time that we have and other constraints. The University of New South Wales has a short online course, Introduction to Enhancing Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Links to an external site., entirely focussed on introducing new higher education teaching staff to evaluating their teaching and their students' learning.

On the next page are some common strategies for you to consider.