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Inside Higher Education
Taking the Pulse of a
Class
New app seeks to shake up student ratings of instruction by promoting
open-ended feedback in the moment, throughout the semester, so that the
feedback becomes more constructive than punitive.
By Colleen Flaherty
February 20, 2018
Even defenders of student evaluations of teaching admit they’re flawed.
A top contention is that students are almost always asked to evaluate a
professor at the end of a course, when they no longer have a personal
incentive to help that instructor teach better.
Enter ClassPulse. Part of a growing market of products that allow
students to offer anonymous, instantaneous feedback on instruction,
ClassPulse is a free application students and professors download to
their phones. From there, students can post comments or questions
visible to everyone in the class. Professors can gauge the significance
of each post by the number of supporting votes it gets from other
students. So a comment with one vote might not mean much. But a comment
with 25 votes is probably representative of students’ concerns,
depending on class size.
Instructors can also post comments or questions or request targeted
feedback via the platform’s “polls” function. “Did you find today’s
exercise useful?” a professor might ask, for example, or “Rate the pace
of my lectures: too slow, too fast, just right.”
Rather than students using their phones throughout class -- to the
point of distraction -- ClassPulse proposes that students use the app
between classes or at key moments while meeting.
Claudia Recchi, a recent graduate of Georgetown University, founded
ClassPulse last year and has built a following based on outreach to
individual instructors and word-of-mouth recommendations. Instructors
nationwide now use the platform, she said, with particular interest
among non-tenure-track professors. That makes sense, given that these
professors are often rehired, or not, based largely on student feedback.
“These people care about their teaching effectiveness not only because
they care about students but because their jobs are on the line,”
Recchi said, noting that faculty developers and teaching center
staffers also have reached out to her personally about ClassPulse.
Recchi, who graduated in 2017 with degrees in operations and
information management and Chinese, said ClassPulse was informed by her
own experiences as an undergraduate.
“As a student you’re always aware that course evaluations are flawed,”
she said. “When the semester comes to an end, you can’t be bothered to
fill them out, or you’re checking boxes or writing super-generic
comments.”
Recchi recalled one professor in particular who was a “great guy” but
who walked through examples too quickly and “had a hard time getting
things across” to students. At the end of the semester, the professor
got terrible evaluations, Recchi said, and wasn’t rehired.
A second professor of finance, meanwhile, she said, asked students to
offer feedback anonymously on his course via a Tumblr page.
“I though that was super useful and wished I had it in all my classes,”
Recchi recalled.
Patrick Johnson, an assistant teaching professor of physics at
Georgetown, uses ClassPulse in his large, lecture-style courses.
Because ClassPulse is only as effective as the share of students using
it is large, Johnson said he asks students to take out their phones and
download the app at the beginning of the semester.
“The fact that students have their phones with them everywhere they go
means this is super easy for them to do,” he said. “So that barrier to
providing feedback is lower. And every professor knows that it’s hard
to get 60 percent of students to fill out course evaluations -- the
best I’ve ever done is in the 70s or 80 percent, and that’s with
constant pestering.”
Because ClassPulse is anonymous, Johnson said he doesn’t know if a
dedicated group is using the app on a regular basis or if different
students are using it all the time. Either way, he said, a critical
mass is using it, to everyone’s benefit.
Asked if ClassPulse means more work, in that he now has to consult the
app and answer student emails, Johnson said he hadn’t studied the
issue. But he guessed that ClassPulse eliminated at least some of the
monotonous, time-consuming work that is answering multiple student
emails about the same questions. And ClassPulse offers anonymity that
some students crave, he said, noting that he’s previously received
comments from students who create accounts like
“concernedphysicsstudent@gmail.com.”
To that point, Johnson said he’d prefer that students approach him
directly with questions, comments or criticism than use any platform.
But as he himself was intimidated by his own professors as an
undergraduate, he said, he gets it.
Johnson said he still pays close attention to students’ narrative
comments in his formal course evaluations, but that ClassPulse is a way
to get that feedback in a more timely manner so that it’s “actionable.”
Sometimes, that means telling students that he’ll consider their
suggestions as policy changes for the next semester, he said. But just
as often it means answering questions or making small changes that
might help students now.
Recchi said that ClassPulse is not currently seeking to replace student
evaluations of teaching, but rather complement them. A small ClassPulse
study involving 12 faculty members, for example, demonstrated that
professors who used the app over a semester saw a 20-percentage-point
increase in their overall teaching ratings, she said.
Going forward, ClassPulse hopes to add more sophisticated analytics so
that professors can track the impact of their interaction with students
on their teaching. Recchi’s eventual plan is to sell ClassPulse to
institutions so that they can offer access to it to all their
professors. The platform seeks to remain instructor centered, not
administrator or ratings centered, however, she said.
Beyond the fact that traditional student evaluations of teaching are
completed after the fact, they’re also often criticized for conveying
students’ bias against professors -- especially those who aren’t white
men. Recchi said that when students give feedback in the moment,
instead of at the end of a course, it tends to be much more targeted
and objective: a professor talked too fast on this day or this
particular quiz was too difficult, for example.
“If you’re looking back on a course, you’re going to give very general
impressions,” she said. “It’s very easy for biases to creep in that
way.”
The IDEA system is another tool for making student feedback more
meaningful, including through instant responses; IDEA’s instant tool
can be delivered to students at any time throughout the semester, but
it currently includes seven set questions instead of open-ended
feedback.
Ken Ryalls, IDEA’s president, said that while ClassPulse’s open design
offers an “opportunity for more flexibility,” pre-designed questions
“can have advantages of reliability and validity, and focusing on
things that really matter to the instructor.”
While both systems have their benefits and drawbacks, he said,
classrooms “are not democracies, and opening up feedback on any subject
that allows students to anonymously give thumbs-ups to seems risky to
the instructor's control of the class.” Somewhat similarly, Ryalls said
he was skeptical about instant feedback’s potential to attenuate
student biases. While some students might vote down, ignore or
otherwise drown out biased perspectives, he said, other students might
join in.
Ryalls said that instant feedback during the semester can be a bridge
to well-designed end-of-course evaluations, and that in a "perfect
world" they’d both always exist.
“I love to talk about feedback as fostering an environment of
co-learning, where the instructor and student truly feel that they're
working together to get better,” he added. “More feedback would
probably lead to more co-learning, provided the feedback is of some
quality.”
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