Improve your SLEQ response rates

When it comes to student feedback, more is generally better. When we have higher response rates, we know that more student voices are being heard and that the feedback an instructor receives is more complete. To ensure that student feedback processes are effective, it is important for everyone to do their part to encourage students to complete their feedback surveys. Providing dedicated class time is the tried-and-true method of improving response rates, and it continues to be the most successful way to encourage responses. Still, what else can be done?

 

GMCTL’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement team coordinates SLEQ for campus and is constantly thinking of ways to support instructors by improving SLEQ response quantity and quality. Beyond simple promotion (PAWS announcements, campus screens, etc.), below are some extra offerings. 

• Classroom Visits – A member of the Teaching and Learning Enhancement team will come for a 15-minute presentation in your physical classroom (or via Zoom) to explain what SLEQ is, how it is used, and tips on writing respectful, constructive comments. Book a class visit through Microsoft Bookings.

• Professionally Produced Video – We worked with USask students to put together a video giving basic advice for completing SLEQ and to explain some of the benefits of writing constructive comments. This is intended to be something analogous to the classroom visits above, but for asynchronous online courses, but could also be distributed in other environments or shown in a classroom. Preview the video. 

• Canvas Pop-up – This one is enabled by default. If students have any incomplete SLEQs, they will see a pop-up each time they sign into Canvas. Instructors can direct student's attention to this pop-up or direct them to the SLEQ Course Feedback area in your Canvas course (if enabled). The direct link also always works for instructors and students alike: https://usask.bluera.com/usask 

Though we strive to offer what we can centrally, the rapport that instructors build with their students is just irreplaceable. Unfortunately, this just adds to an already high workload for instructors who have many competing priorities. This is a challenge. 

To help with the challenge, below you will find some resources, suggestions, and options that can help you build your own coordinated actions to promote SLEQ in your courses:  

• Personal Message – Here is a draft sample message (MS Word document) that can be freely edited to suit your needs and sent to students using whatever channel you use to communicate with your students. Although we send automated invitation and reminder emails already, a dedicated message directly from the course instructor reinforces the message that the feedback is important, helpful, and that it will be used, which may be helpful to motivate students to complete their feedback (Thielsch, Brinkmöller, & Forthmann, 2018)¹. 

• Placeholder Canvas Page – Some students have every intention to complete SLEQ, but just never find the right “time and place” to do so – which is why offering class time can be so effective for improving response rates. If you are teaching asynchronously online, “providing class time” is clearly not possible. To do something similar, consider building a dedicated page in one of your final weeks as a placeholder so that students have the “time and place” to complete SLEQ, which aligns with some recommendations from the research (Young, Joines, Standish, & Gallagher, 2018)². We have created a Canvas Page that can be freely modified to meet your needs. Just search for “Course Feedback Time” in Canvas Commons to add it.

• Monitor Response Rates – If you access SLEQ at https://usask.bluera.com/usask, at the top of the page you’ll find a Subject Management button. Press this to see your real-time response rates to know how effective your promotion efforts are, and whether you might need just a bit more promotion.  

In addition to dedicated messaging about feedback, another strategy we recommend is to make it clear to students when feedback from mid-course SLEQ or previous course offerings has been applied to the course they are currently in. This can be done casually throughout a term, and/or upfront in your course syllabus. For example, you could explain that students had commented that weekly quizzes felt like busy work, so you chose to reduce the frequency and change the format to give students more opportunities to not only demonstrate their understanding, but to apply it in new and interesting ways.  

Whether providing class time or explaining how feedback is used, a common feature across these strategies is that they either implicitly or explicitly communicate to students that their feedback is important and valued. This makes sense. People are more likely to give feedback if they are confident that it will be heard and acted upon. So, how will you show your students that their feedback is important?

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<sup>1) Thielsch, M. T., Brinkmöller, B., & Forthmann, B. (2018). Reasons for responding in student evaluation of teaching. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 56(2018), 189-196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2017.11.008  

2) Young, K., Joines, J., Standish, T., & Gallagher, V. (2018). Student evaluations of teaching: the impact of faculty procedures on response rates. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(1), 37-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1467878</sup>

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^{Title photo credit: Andy Barbour from Pexels.com}

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.