Student evaluations by use of interviews
Interviewing students is a more comprehensive and systematic form of evaluation than “rounds”. By using interviews, the individual student is given time to put their experience of a course or programme into words. Interviews are used as a supplement when issues have emerged in other evaluations that the person with course responsibility/programme coordinator or others with academic responsibility need to gain a deeper understanding of.
Advice for carrying out interviews
- Students and teachers are welcome to form the interview together.
- To avoid being left with an unmanageable amount of data, number of interviews should not be too high. How many are elected must be based on the total number of students in the class.
- Consider in advance who you wish to receive feedback from (e.g., gender, fulltime/parttime, students who have/have not participated in the lectures etc.). If you combine interviews with other methods (e.g., questionnaire), the selection of interviewees can be made based on existing results).
- Make an interview guide’. Before you start formulating the questions, you should think carefully about what you seek to get feedback on, how you plan to use the information and what you expect from the feedback.
- It is recommended that you get someone to read through the questions and provide feedback before you carry out the interviews.
- Before you start asking questions, you should inform the student about what the interview will be about and to what context the interviews will be a part of.
- Formulate questions in a way that invite students to elaborate and give reason for their answers. It may also be a good idea to prepare possible follow-up questions (see example below).
- Avoid including questions that serves no other purpose than “it would be nice to know”. Only ask about conditions that provide information that serves an intent.
Example of an interview-case
The previous semester we received critical comments from students about several themes presented in the literature not being taught in lectures. In this semester we have tried to follow up on this by covering some of the themes through seminar groups.
- Do you think the teaching offered this semester has been good? Is there anything lacking?
- Are there any of the seminar groups or series of lectures you like particularly well? (and if so, what about the teaching do you enjoy?)
- Is there any part of the teaching offered you have not participated in? (and if so, why not?)
- What do you think of your own effort this semester? Can you talk about how you work with your studies?