Engaging the Engagers: How StudentPulse data can empower faculty to enhance teaching and learning
.png)
Effective faculty feedback is key to improving teaching. Moving beyond limited traditional evaluations, integrating ongoing feedback like StudentPulse check-ins allows for continuous enhancement. This article examines how institutions can use StudentPulse data to provide faculty with timely, formative, and actionable insights, supporting growth and better learning.
Faculty are the cornerstone of the academic experience. Their expertise, pedagogical choices, and interactions with students profoundly shape learning outcomes and overall satisfaction. Consequently, providing faculty with meaningful feedback on their teaching is essential for institutional quality and continuous improvement. While student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are commonplace, their limitations are well-documented. Often summative, focused on satisfaction rather than learning, and lacking specific actionable advice, SETs may not effectively support genuine pedagogical growth. Furthermore, faculty themselves sometimes view traditional evaluations with skepticism.
How can institutions provide faculty with more timely, formative, and actionable insights to help them reflect on and enhance their teaching practices? Integrating data from ongoing student feedback mechanisms, like StudentPulse check-ins, into faculty development efforts offers a promising pathway – shifting the focus from end-of-term judgment to ongoing improvement.
Research consistently highlights the power of formative feedback – information provided during the learning process to guide improvement – in enhancing student outcomes. The same principle applies to teaching. Timely feedback allows instructors to make adjustments during a course, rather than only reflecting after the fact.
StudentPulse check-ins, by their nature, provide this kind of formative data stream. Brief, frequent pulses on student perceptions offer insights into the learning experience as it unfolds. This contrasts sharply with traditional SETs, which provide a single snapshot often too late to benefit current students and potentially lacking the specificity needed for targeted change.
What kind of pedagogically relevant insights can faculty glean from StudentPulse data? While respecting individual student confidentiality is paramount, aggregated and anonymized data at the course or departmental level can illuminate valuable trends:
Accessing trends related to these areas can provide faculty with specific, low-inference data points for reflection, moving beyond vague comments on traditional evaluations.
Crucially, using StudentPulse data for faculty development should be framed as a supportive process focused on growth, not a punitive evaluative measure. Institutions can leverage the data effectively through several strategies:
Example: A university's College of Engineering notices a trend in StudentPulse data indicating students across several sophomore-level courses feel lecture content isn't connecting clearly to practical application. The CTL uses this anonymized insight to offer targeted workshops on integrating problem-based learning and real-world case studies into engineering curricula, providing faculty with concrete tools and strategies.
Simply providing data is insufficient. Institutions must also provide support structures:
Student feedback holds immense potential to improve teaching, but only when it is timely, specific, and used within a supportive framework focused on growth. By integrating insights from ongoing check-in platforms like StudentPulse into faculty development initiatives, institutions can move beyond the limitations of traditional evaluations. Empowering faculty with actionable, formative feedback allows them to reflect more effectively on their practice, make targeted adjustments, and ultimately create more engaging and effective learning environments for their students.
This investment in "engaging the engagers" is fundamental to fulfilling the core educational mission.
