Student and staff perceptions of student evaluations
While student evaluations are embedded into higher education, there is debate surrounding the reliability, effectiveness, and bias of such evaluations. Other studies have indicated that feedback from students may not be appropriately taken seriously due to interpretation concerns and a lack of ownership of feedback from both staff and students. This may be attributable to staff less likely to act on their feedback and students being sceptical of the value of providing feedback, which is reflected in the NSS response data surrounding the student voice. There is evidence in the literature to suggest that students want to engage with the evaluation process but suggest that the evaluation process can be re-framed into a staff-student partnership where both staff and students work together to improve learning and teaching in a more collaborative way. The University of Glasgow currently implements a course evaluation policy with set requirements for collecting student evaluations from all courses through a questionnaire with set core questions in addition to a Staff-Student Liaison Committee in conjunction with the Student Representative Council. The initial aim of this project was to investigate additional resources that may be used to better engage staff and students with student evaluations.
