Editorial: Enhancing Teaching Performance: Managing Student Feedback Exercises

• Main Author: Kong, Lily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2004
• Subjects: Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research; Educational Methods
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1743; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3000/viewcontent/Enhancing_Teaching_Student_Feeback_2014_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

When I was an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in the mid-1980s, student feedback exercises were introduced. They were manually conducted via pen-and-paper mode, with administrative staff taking about 10±15 minutes at the start of a lecture class every day in a designated week (usually the last or penultimate week of semester), distributing questionnaires and collecting the completed forms in boxes to have the responses scanned and totted up. This represented the ®rst time that a systematic data collection and feedback mechanism was instituted for students. Since then, various innovations have been introduced to manage student feedback exercises at NUS in the last decade or so, in an effort to ensure that feedback helps to enhance teaching performance. This commentary is offered to share some of the strategies adopted at NUS, particularly to improve response rates in student feedback exercises. In the process, it opens the agenda to discussion of a range of issues surrounding how student feedback exercises can be used to enhance teaching performance.