By Dr. Harry Tennant
Monday, July 18, 2011 Student surveysIn order to determine the effectiveness of teachers and schools, we must learn from their students. The most obvious metrics of student learning come from testing students on content. While critically important, those aren't the only metrics. Another way to learn about effectiveness is to do periodic student surveys. Student surveys will not tell you how much the students have learned (tests tell you that and students aren't very good judges of their learning). However, students are the world's best experts on some other important information: their perceptions and their feelings. Here are some student feelings that can lead to changes to make teachers and schools more effective.
Notice that we aren't talking about replacing education with entertainment. It isn't worth having students be enthusiastic about their schooling at the cost of compromising learning objectives. But if we want students to be enthusiastic about their learning, we must measure their enthusiasm and discover what increases it and what decreases it. If you want to improve the student's emotional reaction to learning, you must first measure what it is. The only way to measure student emotions like these is to ask the students.
Posted at 12:00 AM Keywords: continuous improvement 0 Comments |