Guidelines for SEL Survey

• Maximizing Response Rate Strategies
• A bank of example customized questions has been created for instructors wanting some ideas for up to 5 questions of their own to each of their course surveys.
• Knowledge base article on how to access SEL survey reports
• There is a Redaction Policy for disparaging comments.
• Once you have received student responses, you may want guidance on interpreting the results.

• Be constructive and specific in your comments. 
• Comment from your own experience in the course—use ‘I’ statements to describe your experience.
• Think about the course/unit/chapter learning objectives, and comment on how the course was taught in ways that helped you to meet those objectives.
• Think about and comment on what will help improve the course for future students.
• As a reminder, the feedback that you provide by completing the SEL survey are anonymous and instructors will not see any responses until after grades are posted.
• This is a brief additional video of a student perspective  of the SEL survey.
• The following are two brief videos of faculty perspectives for the SEL survey.
  • Professor Karkour  & Professor Zahabi 

The committee recommends that each college develop college-wide practices based on student feedback of teaching as a part of several methods for assessing teaching and teaching development.  This recommendation includes encouraging instructors and administrators to embrace a perspective of collecting student feedback on their experiences in courses rather than evaluating instructor(s) performance. This perspective is consistent with the research that suggests that students are best able to provide personal experiences about what supports their learning thereby helping instructors to better understand effective teaching strategies, rather than provide evaluative information about individual instructors.  In addition to using the proposed instrument, several additional metrics of teaching effectiveness grounded in best-practices are encouraged, including:

              1.Peer review
              2. Early-to-mid-term student feedback for in-course adjustments (templates available through CEITL)
              3. Self-reflection on teaching philosophy
              4. Self-study of student performance

• When factored into reviews of teaching, SEL information should be contextualized as much as possible (e.g., by cross-referencing responses to related questions and/or considering answers to qualitative as well as quantitative questions.) As noted above, the new standardized SEL survey does not ask students to provide overall ratings of instructors, the goal being to counteract over-relying on a single question/score in isolation from others.
• Use only as part of larger, broader assessment of teaching process such as peer observation, peer review of syllabi & materials, and instructor self-reflection.
• Use only when minimum response rates have been met (literature suggests 65%), and the course enrolls a minimum of 10 students.
• Identify situations (e.g., very large course sections) in which sampling of qualitative comments from large data sets may be acceptable – sample from quartiles based on student’s ratings responses. This may minimize sampling error issues.
• Provide guidance on how to responsibly interpret data.
• Use aggregate data to demonstrate college and institutional effectiveness of teaching at UNH.