Creating & Implementing Student Feedback Surveys in Your Course

The best way to understand how students are doing in a course is to ask them directly - but in order to do so effectively, it is crucial to build trust with your students, provide them with multiple opportunities and channels to provide feedback, and take the time to listen and respond with care. Implementing feedback surveys is a simple yet powerful way to ensure that student voice is incorporated into your course.

Types of Surveys 

Introductory & Exit Surveys 

Conducting a survey before your course begins can help build trust and establish rapport with incoming students, highlight class diversity & build community, help students connect to course goals and identify relevant support services, and of course gather data to inform your teaching. Questions for an introductory or “welcome” survey often relate to the following categories: 

• Participant Information (preferred name, educational background, personal interests)
• Course Goals (assessment of background knowledge, motivation for taking the course)
• Learning Strengths/Challenges (assessment of strategies, attitudes, beliefs about learning) 
• Support (students’ preferred ways of getting help)

Conducting an anonymous post-semester (or “exit”) survey is an excellent way to better understand students’ experience over the semester. It can help you gauge whether students met your course's deep learning goals, the efficacy of various teaching tools and practices, and where there might be room to rethink aspects of the course for the future. Feedback surveys are often far more informative than final grades or course evaluations, and can allow you to get a better picture of students’ true learning journeys. 

Below are examples of introductory and exit surveys: 

Example - Intake/Welcome Survey

Please complete this brief survey before our first class so that I can get to know you.

• What is your preferred name & pronunciation? 
• What pronouns do you use? 
• What is the best email address at which to contact you?
• Why are you taking this course? What do you hope to learn from this course?
• Have you ever taken a [course type and/or discipline, e.g., Design/Studio Art/Biology/Finance] course before? If so, what course(s)? 
• [OPTIONAL - for technical/workshop/lab/applied courses]. Do you have experience with any of the following [software programs / tools]? (Please select all that apply):
  • R Studio 
  • SPSS Statistical Software 
  • Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop 
  • Rhino 3D
  • If you selected 1 or more, please describe your experience here:
• Do you have experience with any other [category/discipline, e.g. design or statistics] software programs/tools? If so, which?
• What are you most excited about this semester? Any concerns or anticipated challenges? 
• Anything else you’d like to tell me? 

Thank you! I look forward to working with you this summer!

Example - Exit Survey

Please tell us about your experience in “   Course Title    ”. Your responses are anonymous. 

[OPTIONAL - list all weeks/topics as reminder] 

• Which week/topic did you find most valuable? 
• Which assignment did you find most valuable or enjoyable? Why?  
• Which reading(s) were especially valuable? Could any reading or assignment be eliminated?
• How was the balance between lecture and discussion [and group work/breakouts]? 
• How was the course pace? 
  • Too fast 
  • Too slow 
  • Just right 
  • If you selected “Too fast/slow”, please elaborate: 
• What do you think you’ll remember 5 years from now?
• How will you apply what you learned?
• What would you change? 
• What do you want to learn next? 
• Anything else you’d like to share? 

Thank you for your feedback! We enjoyed having you in class this summer. 

Mid-Semester Feedback Surveys 

Conducting a brief survey during the semester or on a regular (weekly or biweekly) basis is a great way to discover not only which aspects of your course are working (and which may not be), but also how students themselves are feeling about their learning. Student experience is complex and multifaceted, and informed by a variety of factors related to their personal, non-class lives, the social aspects of class and the process of learning, and their experience with the content of your course and their understanding of it. 

It can be easy to rely solely on potentially false or misleading sources of information such as graded assessments (e.g. quiz and exam scores), or volunteered responses or subjective behavior such as eye contact and nodding in class - while these are valid measures to consider, they do not provide a complete picture of how the course is going for individual learners or the group as a whole. Rather, you can build community by creating dedicated space and time to take inventory of how your students are doing from their own perspective through a survey.

However, providing feedback mechanisms alone  is not enough - once you open those channels of communication, it’s important to actually respond to what you hear. Even if you don’t plan to change certain aspects of the course, acknowledging and addressing the patterns and trends you see in student feedback is crucial. The same goes for unique student needs - although you may not be able to accommodate every request, you can explain why you cannot, and can demonstrate that you are taking it seriously. 

Finally, it’s easy to forget that “feedback” can mean more than just students’ opinions of teaching practices or curriculum - often, students use feedback surveys as a safe space to share life events or other important context that you may not be able to ask about directly.  

Tips on Creating Feedback Surveys

• Try a mix of specific & open-ended questions. This helps students focus their responses to be as constructive as possible while also giving them the space to express thoughts you may not be able to anticipate.  
  • What did you find most useful or interesting?
  • What has been most challenging or distancing?
  • What lingering questions do you have? 
  • What else should I know?
• Try a “plus/delta” (+ / △)  format. 

• Try a “stop/start/continue” framework. 

Some courses - for example new courses, courses in which a new tool or technology is being piloted, or in which the format or structure of course content has dramatically changed -  may benefit from more robust, custom surveys that ask about specific aspects of students’ experience.

See an example of a midterm feedback survey that was developed for Greg Sabin’s MGMT E-2000 course, a pilot in which the course format was “flipped” and the bulk of course content was developed to be hosted online.

Interested? 

If you’re interested in developing feedback surveys for your course, book a consultation with a course designer to discuss your ideas and get feedback. If you’d like to partner with our team to help you think through implementing changes to address student feedback, apply for an Implementation Partnership. If your application is accepted the process will begin with an initial meeting to determine the goals, scope, and approximate timeline of the project, followed by several meetings and ongoing communication and feedback with the design team.