Message sent to all Spring 2025 Instructional Staff on April 30, 2025.Student Course Survey |
Dear Faculty and Course Instructors, This semester’s student course survey was released this past weekend. This anonymous survey administered by the Office of Institutional Data includes several kinds of questions, including a few that are being asked for the first time this semester. I am writing to describe the types of questions included in the survey and how the results are used. The core of the survey consists of the eleven questions that have been asked since the Fall of 2018 to assess all Lehigh classes. These questions are designed to allow students to provide their opinions of the teaching, organization and content of the course. Student responses to these questions are made available to the instructors as well as department, college and university leadership soon after the end of the semester. A subset of these results are included in faculty dossiers as part of the reappointment, promotion and tenure (RPT) processes. Student responses to these questions play an important role in the evaluation of faculty during these processes. Additional questions can be added to this core survey by various groups, including instructors, departments and colleges. These questions may be added to gain insight into recent changes made to a course or to assess whether a specific college-wide goal was effectively achieved. Student responses to these questions are made directly available to the person/group who requested that the questions be added, who may share them more broadly. These questions will not be included in the RPT dossier, unless the candidate chooses to do so. Starting in 2021, the Provost’s office has added a few questions to the student course survey. The purpose of these questions has been to provide a better understanding of the student academic experience at Lehigh. These questions are not intended to assess faculty teaching or to be used in the annual RPT processes. For example, in 2021 we added a question about the number of hours that students estimated they spent each week on the class. This information is now provided to students at the time of registration to help them plan their schedules. This semester, we are asking a few additional questions, including a question about the kinds of instruction (e.g. lecture, discussion, laboratory, project based learning etc.) used in the class and a question about the use of technologies, including Generative AI tools, in the class. We will review the data collected from these responses, make it available to faculty and consider how this information may be provided to students as they seek courses that best meet their academic needs. This information will not be included in the dossiers for faculty RPT. Finally, I want to acknowledge that the use of student course evaluations is only one tool for both assessing the quality of instruction and understanding the experience of students in our classrooms, and it is an imperfect one. As we advance our strategic focus on student outcomes, and given the need to develop and implement innovative approaches in our teaching, we will be looking to develop better ways of assessing student learning and students’ classroom experience, and how we use them to support enhancing the education that we provide to students. In the meantime, I ask you to encourage your students to fill out this survey. Some suggestions for steps faculty can take to enhance response rates are available on OID’s website. Thanks for the work that you do to enhance the education of Lehigh students. Best, |