Instructors learn about their effectiveness with students in various ways. One way is to assess the student learning that is exhibited by the students in your classes. Such things as exams, papers, projects, home work assignments, and class discussion will provide the instructor with indications of whether the students in the class are learning effectively.

Instructors may also learn about their effectiveness by listening to students. Instructors are able to learn about students' perceptions and attitudes in many informal ways. There is a place for this informal assessment, but also a place for a more formal way to obtain student reactions. This more formal way to obtain student input allows instructors to obtain independent reactions from all students, not just some of the students.

Some systems of student evaluation of instruction, because they have standard questions, do not allow the instructor to obtain the information which would be most helpful to them to learn how they might change their course to make the course more effective. The evaluation instrument presented here permits this choice by allowing faculty to select from more than 240 items relating to instruction.

It should be noted that the purpose of this evaluation process is the improvement of instruction. Only the instructor will be aware of the responses of their students. No records will be kept by any CMU office or department. The only copy of the results will be the property of the instructor. Copies of the results returned to each instructor could become a document that might be requested through a Freedom of Information Request. If instructors are concerned about this possibility, they should destroy their copy after they have reviewed the results.

Students will respond to these items by indicating the degree of their agreement with the statement. The response categories will be: strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree. For each area, one or two general items have been selected. They are indicated by italics. Instructors may wish to select these items to obtain general student evaluation and then in subsequent uses of this instrument to select more specific items to further identify student evaluations and perceptions. Given different goals of different classes, instructors may wish to custom design forms for the different courses they teach. Also, instructors may wish to evaluate the same course with different items in different semesters. Instructors may also choose to evaluate a class at different points of the semester with either the same or different items.

The IDF-II form contains seven questions concerning the characteristics and behaviors of the students in the class, 248 multiple choice questions relating to the evaluation of the class and instructor and 12 open-ended questions. The 248 multiple choice questions are divided into major categories of student development and responsibilities, instructor performance, course elements and an other category. Within these categories there are sub-categories. Within each sub-category, there are general questions for that category which are indicated by appearing in italics. Instructors may wish to select from the suggested essay questions to obtain students' written comments.

Instructors will be able to select as many items as they wish. Instructors should review the items that follow, and select those which would best provide information which might be used to improve instruction. It is suggested that instructors might wish to select the general questions in the various categories to determine if problems exist. For areas where student responses indicate a potential problem, instructors may then wish to ask additional questions in the category to clarify student concerns. Results will be presented to the instructor in terms of the number and percentage of student responses in each of the five response categories for each question they select. No information about other instructors will be provided. Means for the questions selected may be requested for categories of the characteristics and behavior of student questions selected by the instructor. For example faculty may wish to learn of the students' mean responses for males and females, for those who are taking the course because it is required and scores for those taking it as an elective, etc.

Instructors should also recognize that there are other techniques that might be used to obtain information to improve instruction. Among these techniques are peer evaluation of course syllabi, exams, and other course material. Peer visits to class and reactions are also valuable. For a more complete list of these additional techniques to improve instruction, please refer to pages 7-10 of the Final Report of the Task Force for the Revision of Instruments for Student Evaluation of Instruction.