NMSU course evaluations

I expected that we, as a class, would be able to improve upon the standard English Department course evaluation survey, or at least find a few simple tweaks that would potentially garner better answers.  What I didn't expect to find was that the process of reworking the survey would mean really reworking it, entirely rethinking what data the survey hoped to gather and possibly reformatting the entire form.  I left the class with more questions than I entered with, which is probably a good thing.  I realized that in order to know how to rework the form we would need to know specifically what data was important and to whom that data would be important.  That's an obvious insight, I know.  Still, I assumed that we would know enough about the recipients of the data to predict what answers they would find most helpful.  In reality, I think that would mean first putting together a survey for the potential data recipients since, in the case of this "survey to determine a survey", we would be the recipients of the data and would know (at least in part) what data we would need.

We talked about a focus group as well, one that involved teachers and administrators who would likely be using the data.  In a focus group or in interviews we could discuss what information would be important to those individuals and perhaps plan the survey that would lead us to data to plan the course survey that would lead to data that would help the individuals in the focus group and their colleagues. (Whew!)  Without that knowledge it became difficult to really rework the course survey.  We tried to balance students' comfort with the questions with strategies to create more productive questions and we tried to figure out the best balance of the more quantitative A through F system (which may give unfairly biased and half-assed answers) with the open-ended questions that should yield more thorough information (though they also lead to half-assed smiley faces etc.)  In the end I think that the information we were lacking that would have been most helpful (besides the previously mentioned insight into the minds of a larger number of teachers and administrators) was a chance to see the course evaluations from a variety of other classes both outside our department and outside our school.  There has to be someone out there who has looked into this extensively and produced a highly useful version of the English department course evaluation survey that could be modified to suit our situation.