What are cases when it’s NOT useful to do mid-quarter evaluations?<\/strong> When you haven’t interacted with enough students in person, the feedback you get might be lacking, or there simply won’t be enough data points to infer anything useful. It also won’t be good to collect feedback and then not addressing them in any manner, as it sends the message that students’ feedbacks don’t matter.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBelow are some testimonials from TAs that did mid-quarter evaluations previously. Hope you find these useful. As always, let me know if you have questions!<\/p>\n
— Trang<\/p>\n
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Kenneth Shim<\/strong>
\nUndergraduate TA, ECE 215<\/p>\nI think the mid-quarter evaluations helped to shape the quiz section structure (EE 215) to better suit the student needs. A number of students agreed when they said that I moved pretty quickly through content, and that’s something that I wouldn’t have thought was an issue until I was told. The feedback session\/form also helped the students feel more comfortable providing feedback since it’s anonymous. When I addressed the feedback and adjusted my teaching style based on this feedback, I think the students felt more comfortable asking questions and felt more comfortable talking to me in general.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Kevin Everson<\/strong>
\nGraduate TA, ECE 235<\/p>\nAs a first-time TA, receiving feedback from my students via the mid-quarter evaluation was incredibly beneficial in creating a lab environment that worked better for everyone. During the first week of lab and beyond, I often encouraged students to give me feedback on how to improve my teaching, but it seemed that many students are reluctant or too shy to express this feedback face-to-face. In my case, several students requested that I make pre-class announcements, which preemptively caught issues that students were likely to encounter. Not only was it useful to hear the ways in which I could improve, but it was nice to receive reinforcement on the aspects of my teaching which were already effective. During the end-of-quarter evaluations, both the changes that I made as a result of the mid-quarter evaluations and the approaches I was already employing were cited as things that students found helpful.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Sang Sagong<\/strong>
\nGraduate TA, ECE 233, 235 (multiple times) and PMP 547<\/p>\nThe mid-quarter evaluation helped me a lot when I was a TA. I had two different types of the mid-quarter evaluation, by you <\/em>[Trang] and by myself. I think the mid-quarter evaluation by you gave me more detail feedback from students, so I could recognize what I have to keep and what I have to change in the rest of the quarter. Usually, TAs get feedback at the end of the quarter, which might be a little bit late to improve the lab session for the students in that quarter (even though TA can improve next quarter). However, based on the mid-quarter evaluation, I could immediately improve and meet the demands of the students. Also, the self mid-quarter evaluation is helpful because it is a checklist in order to check whether I am doing well based on generic criteria.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ada.ece.uw.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/24\/2019\/01\/Alvin-Cao-300x270.jpg\")
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Alvin Cao<\/strong>
\nGraduate TA, ECE 271 (multiple times) and ECE 215 (multiple times)<\/p>\nRunning mid-quarter evaluations was beneficial to pretty much all involved parties. There was a minimal amount of effort needed to run them (about 10-15 minutes at the beginning of one section). I received positive feedback which made me feel like the effort I put into teaching was worth it. I also received constructive feedback that allowed me to make quick, easy changes to my teaching or communication style, without feeling like I was doing a bad job or anything. Sometimes there were also comments about things I couldn’t directly control about the class, but upon sharing those with the professor we were sometimes able to make changes. Lastly, I think students like the idea that there is a head TA, or some force evaluating their TAs – it makes them realize that the department does indeed care about the quality of their education.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ada.ece.uw.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/24\/2019\/02\/Jacob-Lewis-300x225.jpeg\")
Jacob Lewis<\/strong>
\nGraduate TA, ECE 393<\/p>\nI thought that the mid-quarter evaluations were helpful because they allowed me to get some new ideas on ways to improve my class. I also think that it reinforced some areas that I was doing well, and let me know of some areas in which I could improve.<\/em><\/p>\nThat being said, I didn\u2019t necessarily think that they were super useful and that every student should need to do them.<\/em><\/p>\n[Editor’s note<\/span>: Follow up question — what aspects were not so useful? E.g. were the comments not specific enough? Were students asking for things you could not change?]<\/p>\nI felt like there were issues in the course and that students did not feel like the course was necessary (EE Writing Class<\/em> [Editor’s note<\/span>: Students, if you’re reading this, written communication in engineering is absolutely necessary! It can sometimes make you stand out as a candidate!]), so much of my feedback was was more along the lines of \u201cJacob does a good job with what he is required to teach\u201d. I think my students all thought that the class was strange so they didn\u2019t get to focus much on my skills.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hope everyone’s quarter is going well! As we approach the mid quarter, I encourage you to consider doing mid-quarter evaluations. TL;DR: Most TAs should do it! It’s minimal effort on your end, while the feedback benefits all parties. See what other TAs have to say at the end of this post! UPDATE for Spring 2020…<\/p>\n
Read more<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1190,"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/1190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.ece.uw.edu\/eceta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}