Evaluation of Teaching Practice as Support Tool to Ensure Academic Quality

Course evaluation supports academic quality and the acquisition of skills by teaching staff by gathering and processing student feedback about the courses. Teaching staff receive these results very soon after the evaluation forms are sent in, and can therefore discuss points with their students and if necessary ask about the results and obtain suggestions for improvement from the students. The evaluations also assess the skills acquired by the students on each course.

Use in a Questionnaire

In order to evaluate the methodical and didactic aspects of the courses, the questionnaires contain scaled questions about the use of teaching aids (lecture notes, media, literature, e-learning), the forms of teaching/learning used, and the structure of content. Students also evaluate how fairly they are treated, the support they receive for presentations or other tasks, and the transparency of performance requirements, and therefore give teaching staff practical feedback about the methodical and didactic design of the course. At the same time teaching staff gain an impression of whether students’ perceptions differ from their own assessment and where it might be worth altering the concept. The freetext fields at the end of the questionnaires have proven to be especially useful for students to express concrete wishes, suggestions or criticism about the course, because they are not bound by set themes or answer categories and do also take the opportunity to propose practical and often very workable solutions for problems that they have experienced.

The aim of making teaching staff deal with student feedback is to (further) develop planning and implementation skills for teaching.