Speaker 1: In order to create really great classes semester after semester, something to keep in mind is asking your students how they felt about the course when the semester comes to an end. So one way of doing this is to create a course assessment designed specifically for each section that you teach. So this is outside of the student evals that students fill out at the end of the semester as part of your college or university. For the course assessments that I create, there are seven particular areas that I feel are strongly needed in order to get the best sense of what worked and didn't work in my classroom. In the first section, I ask my students about the required text that they read, watched, or viewed. I teach literature and writing courses, so in my literature courses, I tend to have anywhere between five to eight novels, potentially picture books, fairy tales, short stories, etc. that students read throughout the semester. So I just list out all the required texts my students read and watch and ask them which helped them most with their learning and which did they feel they learned the least from. And so they can rank them in order, or they can just say, you know, these three I felt I learned a lot from, and these two I felt could have been replaced by something a bit better. I also asked which one they liked the most and liked the least. Of course, I would love my students to like all the books. The learning aspect is more important to me, but it's always good to know, did they learn the most from this book, but they liked it the least? Or is it that matchup of this book seemed to be the one the majority felt worked best for their learning, and they also all really enjoyed it? Whenever I have those two answers combined together in that way, I make sure to make a point to keep that on my to-have-again in future courses. The next section in my course assessment focuses on the major assignments that students complete throughout the semester. So these aren't the small in-class activities or small diagrams or homework assignments. They're the final paper and a creative project. I do autobiographies as well and group projects. So for each one I asked, you know, did they learn a lot from it? Did they feel that it could have been designed in a way that would have helped with their learning more? So I asked both, which worked best, which worked least well, and how would they redesign any of the assignments if they feel they should be redesigned? And that's always a really interesting question to get the answers from for my students. The next two sections are about those smaller assignments, both in class and for homework. So I basically ask, in class, did you feel you learned the most from the lectures, from the small group discussions, from the whole class discussions, from the small writing activities I had them do or turn in using the board or the projector? What did they feel they learned the most from or the least from? What worked best as far as how the class was designed physically but also in how it's structured day-to-day, week-by-week? And then for homework, most of my homework assignments have to do just with reading the course text, but I also have small assignments as well that they can partake in to get either extra credit or if they miss a class, you know, I might ask them to curate some kind of concept map or diagram in connection to the narrative we're reading that week. So again, I ask them what worked, what didn't work, and why. After I know about the major assignments and the required texts and the smaller assignments, then I ask more about things that I do. So for example, the feedback that I give them for each of the major assignments, I ask them, did that work for you? Were you able to understand what I said about how they can improve their work? Do they want more type of feedback that I didn't give them? Would they prefer to have more formative feedback rather than summative, which I tend to stick to mostly in my classes? So I just get a sense of, did they feel they learned from what I had to say about each of their assignments? Or did they not even bother to read them when I get it back to them? And the sixth element is talking about the course tools. So I'm very much a proponent of using digital tools in my classroom to make sure that anybody who's absent can see online what they missed. And so I use our learning management system constantly throughout the semester. And so I ask them, did the design of our LMS site work for them, or did they feel that it was confusing? Did they want more on it or less? So you just get a sense of how they felt the LMS site worked throughout the semester. And then the final section that I ask are just some true or false statements that I ask them to say, do they agree or do they disagree? And so this can be whatever you want, but for some examples would be, I ask them, going into the class, I thought it would be hard, and it was harder than I expected. Or I thought it was going to be hard, but it was easier than I expected. I thought it was going to be easy, but it was harder than I expected, and so on, to have a range of those questions. But then I also ask, I wish that there was more lecture in this class. Or I wish we had more background on the authors we were reading. Or I wish that there was less discussion and more practicing of writing in the classroom. And so I just have a list of statements, and they can just say true or false. And that's the complete assessment that I have my students complete every semester. As far as how to assign the course assessment, for the most part, I used to print them out and pass them out in class, and give them as much time as they needed during the last week to fill it out. But this semester, I tried something new, and I actually made an online version of it. And you can use your LMS site, or Google, or whatever type of survey creation tool you want to use, and you can just have them fill it out. And that way, you tend to get some graphs or data built in, depending on the tool that you use. And so I found a lot of success in having it done in that way. There's also the question of whether or not you had them fill them out anonymously, or put their name on it. Personally, I feel anonymous works better, because they tend to be more truthful in that way. And so I say, if you want me to know who said this in my class, feel free to put your name. But that's totally optional, because I'd rather have your honest opinions on how the class went. If you want to know more about my course assessment practices, go ahead and check out my blog post that I have linked below, as that ties in straight into this video. If you feel this video was useful to you, you might want to subscribe to this channel, as I'll be posting more and more videos connected to my blog post in the future.