Who hasn’t been hurt, depressed, and otherwise provoked by student responses to those open-ended questions routinely included on course rating forms? Often the comments carry emotional messages, and often faculty respond with an equal amount of feeling. Hodges and Stanton (reference below) challenge us to consider how some student comments may “give us valuable insight into intellectual challenges common to novice learners in our field.” (p. 280) They suggest we view student comments differently—that we bring to the analysis of them a “scholar’s eye” (p. 280) that might help us better understand the learning challenges students face in courses.

Students don’t arrive in our classes as sophisticated learners—most of us know that firsthand. They may not understand that learning is a process or may “have immature beliefs about how learning happens or how knowledge is created, not recognizing how tentative, iterative, and effortful a process it is.” (p. 280) If that’s the case, then student comments on performance may actually reveal beliefs about learning that make efforts to learn very challenging. To illustrate, the authors offer a sampling of common student comments made in three different kinds of courses.

Quantitative Classes—classes where students do lots of problem solving

Student comment: “Problems on the exams were nothing like those covered in class or assigned in homework.”

Most faculty find this comment especially irritating. Problems done in class are like those that end up on exams, and so students aren’t paying attention, aren’t spending time doing the problems, or just plain aren’t studying enough. All these things may be true, but it is also possible that “these student comments reflect the differences in the way novices approach problem solving compared to experts.” (p. 282)

As documented by other research cited in this article, students “rush to an answer, spending very little time thinking through various choices of procedure. They focus on the importance of problem solving on the answer rather than the process.” (p. 282) Because students are so answer driven, they don’t step back and see the overall structure of a problem—which is just like others done in class and on the homework.

How can teachers helps students develop this kind of insight? “Our problem-solving exercises for students must explicitly require them to spend meaningful time analyzing principles involved and envisioning how those same principles might be ‘disguised’ in other settings.” (p. 282) This can also be accomplished by having students “annotate” their work on selected problems—that is, they explain in writing what they are doing and why. The same insight can be achieved by having students explain to other students how they solved a problem.

Writing-Intensive Courses

Student comment: “I don’t understand the grading. We need to know what counts for points and what doesn’t.”

When writing papers, students often try to write what they think their teachers want to read. That’s not entirely wrong—writers do need to write with the audience in mind. But students frequently translate this as conveying the “right” information—interpreting the poem the same way the teacher does—not as “the ability to construct an interesting, persuasive argument.” (p. 283) Most writing assignments are designed to get students to produce information; students are much more comfortable reproducing information already received. So when they write a paper that says what their teacher has said and they don’t do well, they are confused. They don’t understand the grading criteria. One obvious solution is to have students openly discuss in class and with each other exactly what the writing task requires.

Students are also naïve about what the writing process entails. For them, the first write is when the major time investment occurs. Editing is a simple matter of spell-checking and proofreading. Having students revise and rewrite—sometimes more than once—helps them see how ideas can grow and change as those ideas are explored through writing.

Courses with Active Learning Formats

Student comment: “I didn’t come to college to teach myself.”

Students come to college having already had lots of experience with teachers. They are used to teachers telling. They expect to learn from teachers, not from fellow students. And as teachers observe students’ feeble first attempts to figure things out for themselves, we are quickly convinced that telling is definitely the more efficient way. “We … are frequently conditioned to think of teaching as telling, transferring our understanding and habits of mind by sheer force of will to our students.” (p. 284)

It is always wise to share with students the educational rationale behind a decision to have them work out problems in groups, to generate examples with others, or to arrive at consensual decisions. The authors cast the problem and solution this way: “Too often we provide students with answers in our disciplines before they even understand the questions. Focusing more of our classes around the questions in our discipline and how we strive to find some answer to them can help students see the processes involved in the human quest for knowledge.” (p. 285) Discussions like these move students beyond those conceptions of teaching as information transfer.

The section on the course evaluation that asks for student comments is usually designed to provide insights as to how satisfied students were with a course. These authors wonder if that’s what we really want to know. They suggest some alternatives: that we ask students how their thinking about a subject may have changed or what the course has contributed to their development as thinkers or individuals. They recommend that we keep ourselves and students focused on the kind and quality of learning experiences offered by and throughout the course.

Reference: Hodges, L. C., and Stanton, K. (2007). Translating comments on student evaluations into the language of learning. Innovative Higher Education, 31, 279-286.

"This article first appeared in The Teaching Professor, a newsletter written for everyone involved with classroom instruction in higher education. See for yourself what a great tool The Teaching Professor is - sign up for a free 3-month, no-obligation trial subscription.