Student Feedback Analysis

Ensuring Students Act on Feedback Feedback is only as valuable as the action students take in response to it. Too often, feedback becomes a passive exchange,teachers give comments, students glance at them, and then move on to the next task without making meaningful improvements. To truly accelerate progress, we need to create structures that ensure feedback leads to independent development. Here’s how: 1. Build Dedicated Feedback Lessons into Your Scheme of Work If feedback is to be effective, there must be time for students to engage with it properly. This means moving beyond a quick ‘read your comments’ approach and embedding dedicated feedback lessons into the scheme of work. By protecting this time within the curriculum, feedback becomes a continuous, structured process rather than an afterthought. 2. Use Targeted and Specific Feedback Vague comments like ‘be more analytical’ or ‘develop your explanation’ don’t give students a clear direction. Instead, feedback should be precise and actionable. For example: • Before: ‘Your analysis is weak.’ • After: ‘To strengthen your analysis, explain why this event was significant and link it to a wider consequence.’ Or Pose questions to help students develop their answer or guide them to the correct knowledge. Pairing feedback with examples or sentence starters can help students apply improvements more effectively. 3. Teach Students How to Use Feedback Students need to be explicitly taught how to engage with feedback. This includes: • Modelling the process – Show students how to act on feedback by walking them through a worked example. • Guiding self-reflection – Use prompts like, ‘How does my answer compare to the model? Where can I improve?’ • Encouraging peer support – Structured peer review can help students identify strengths and areas for development before teacher intervention. I often like to highlight a weak paragraph in a green box so students know what area to precisely improve/re-write, as you can see below. 4. Use Feedback Trackers to Monitor Progress Instead of feedback disappearing into exercise books, encourage students to keep a feedback tracker where they record teacher comments and their own reflections. They can then set targets for the next piece of work and review previous feedback to ensure they’re improving over time. Feedback is most powerful when it becomes part of the learning process, not just an add-on. By allocating time in the curriculum for feedback lessons, making guidance explicit, and encouraging students to take ownership, we can transform feedback from words on a page into meaningful improvement. The ultimate goal? Students who no longer just receive feedback, but actively use it to progress.

🎯 It's all about feedback: student evaluations We all need feedback to grow—at work, in science, and in teaching. In industry or national labs, our managers (who may not know every technical detail) still give us valuable input on teamwork and professional growth, and contribution to the team success. In academia, we get constant feedback via paper and grant reviews, and through student course evaluations. Many colleagues ask, “How can students evaluate professors?” Student comments can be blunt or even harsh, testing your moral fiber to read them. But feedback, however imperfect, is essential to improve. What matters isn’t just what I know, but how well I communicate and support learning. To make evaluations more useful, I explain why they matter and how I’ll act on them. Then, at semester’s end, I steel myself to review the results—and I can clearly see how things evolve! Spring 2024 vs. Spring 2025 (averages) Metric 2024 Avg → 2025 Avg Instructor contributed to understanding 4.40 → 4.60 Course challenged you 4.60 → 5.00 Atmosphere invited extra help 4.20 → 4.50 Responded to inquiries in 48–72 hrs 4.40 → 4.56 Respectful & positive environment 4.40 → 4.90 Useful feedback on assignments 4.20 → 4.11 Sessions well organized 4.60 → 4.70 Materials enhanced learning 4.40 → 4.70 Hours/week outside class ~6–7 hrs → ~8–9 hrs Key takeaways • Higher engagement: Response rate up, students feel more challenged • Stronger climate: Positive, supportive scores climbed across the board • Room to grow: “Useful feedback” dipped slightly—time to refine assignment comments Grateful for every piece of feedback. Here’s to iterating and communicating even more effectively next semester!

When I first started teaching online back in 2017, the course evaluation process bothered me. Initially, I was excited to get feedback from my students about their learning experience. Then I saw the survey questions. Even though there were about 15 of them, none actually helped me improve the course. They were all extremely generic and left me scratching my head, unsure of what to do with the information. It’s not like I could ask follow-up questions or suggest improvements to the survey itself. Understandably, the institution used these evaluations for its own data points, and there wasn’t much chance of me influencing that process. So, I decided to take a different approach. What if I created my own informal course evaluations that were completely optional? In this survey, I could ask course-specific and teaching-style questions to figure out how to improve the course before the next run started. After several revisions, I came up with these questions: - Overall course rating (1–5 stars) - What was your favorite part (if any) of this course? - What did you find the least helpful (if any) during this course? - Please rate the relevancy of the learning materials (readings and videos) to your academic journey, career, or instructional design journey. (1 = not relevant at all, 10 = extremely relevant) - Please rate the relevancy of the learning activities and assessments to your academic journey, career, or instructional design journey. (1 = not relevant at all, 10 = extremely relevant) - Did you find my teaching style and feedback helpful for your assignments? - What suggestions do you have for improving the course (if any)? - Are there any other comments you'd like to share with me? I was—and still am—pleasantly surprised at how many students complete both the optional course survey and the official one. If you're looking for more meaningful feedback about your courses, I recommend giving this a try! This process has really helped me improve my learning experiences over time.

Tools in Data Science Sep 2025 edition is live: https://tds.s-anand.net/. Major update: a new AI-Coding section and fresh projects. I teach TDS at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras as part of the BS in Data Science. Anyone can audit. The course is public. You can read the content and practice assessments. I fed the May 2025 term student feedback into ChatGPT and asked: • 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘯𝘰𝘯-𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 / 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴? • 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘣𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴? • 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴? Full analysis: https://lnkd.in/gVWVqaxN: summary, outliers, and action ideas. Most students find the course tough (or at least time-consuming), especially the Remote Online Exam (ROE). 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗲: students who mentioned ROE time limits rated it 2.61 vs 2.33 (+12%!). Those who felt time pressure also saw more value -- suggesting "desirable difficulty," rather than frustration. A minority even asked for 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴. The main actions are faster feedback loops, automated pre-checks, mock ROEs, clear rubrics, etc. But my two takeaways are: • Students value rigor and challenge, even if it makes the course harder. • Using LLMs to analyze student feedback is a force multiplier for instructors.