Online Student Evaluation Response Rates

From wsuwiki

We've been studying online student evaluation response rates. Here is my preliminary conclusion:

Perhaps it is a leap to suggest that evaluation response rate is an indicator of student engagement, and, more specifically, an indication of the lack of shared understanding about the purposes of evaluation, which is vital aspect of an engaged community of learners. The story presented here, however, suggests response rates are indicators that, as Elbow argues, “We can do more to improve practice with student evaluations” because students “have more evidence, more data.” He notes that “they see lots of other teachers in just as much detail, so they are in an ideal position to make informed comparisons about the effectiveness of different procedures” (online, [1]). But to do more, we should heed Kuh’s admonition and make the effort to more fully involve students in the learning process. The effort we have undertaken to contextualize student evaluations, to make them available online, to encourage more formative, mid-term use, to demonstrate responsiveness to what students are telling us (which is not the same as capitulating to what they may think they want from us), is only the beginning of that effort. It means we need to promote and nurture a culture that recognizes the value of student voices, expanding the qualitative potential. For instance, by incorporating qualitative responses into the course evaluation tool, faculty attend more fully to the meaning that students have constructed about their experiences. As the public increasingly requires that we post evaluations in the new learning market, it is incumbent upon us to understand for ourselves and present for others the implications of the evaluations process in all of its complexity. Learning is not a simple phenomenon, and one number or ten do not adequately represent or measure it. It is in that context where response rates are themselves a critical indicator of student engagement, a valuable data point, and, whether we are prepared to embrace the full and final implications, a critical indicator of faculty engagement.