SUFAT: An analytics tool for gaining insights from student feedback comments

• Main Authors: PYASI, Siddhant, GOTTIPATI, Swapna, SHANKARARAMAN, Venky
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Student feedback; Teaching evaluations; Insights; Sentiments; Suggestions; Text analytics; Tool; Databases and Information Systems; Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4226; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5229/viewcontent/SUFAT_2019.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Teacher evaluation is a vital element inimproving student learning outcomes. Course and instructor feedback given bystudents, provides insights that can help improve student learning outcomes andteaching quality. Teaching and course evaluation systems help to collectquantitative and qualitative feedback from students. Since manually analysingthe qualitative feedback is painstaking and a tedious process, usually, onlythe quantitative feedback is often used for evaluating the course and theinstructor. However, useful knowledge is hidden in the qualitative comments, inthe form of sentiments and suggestions that can provide valuable insights tohelp plan improvements in the course content and delivery. In order toefficiently gather, analyse and provide deeper insights from student feedbackby topics, we developed a user-friendly application, StUdent Feedback AnalysisTool (SUFAT). The tool is an independent desktop application that can beinstalled and used by any non-technical user. The tool takes an excel sheetwith comments as an input and generates an excel sheet with visual reports ofsummaries that include sentiments and suggestions as an output. The tool canbenefit instructors to quickly analyse the termly qualitative feedback and takeappropriate actions. We intend to release the tool for public use so thatinstructors can download and install the tool on their computer system.