Informal Student Evaluations To Enhance Teaching And Learning In Legal Education

Abstract

Students’ evaluations on courses and their teachers are normally conducted at the end of each course. It usually takes at least a few months before teachers can see the comments and feedback of students from the evaluation results, by which time it would be too late to address any comments of these students for the benefit of them. It is argued that some of the students may also not have a strong incentive to provide genuine comments and feedback because they know that their comments will not benefit them before the relevant courses finish. This paper seeks to investigate the effectiveness of an alternative form of student evaluation, an informal mid-term student evaluation of their teachers which is conducted in the middle of the term when the course is taught half-way through, as a tool to enhance both student learning and teaching. The paper reports on the findings of research on both students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the pilot implementation of this informal mid-term student evaluations by a number of tutors in the tutorials of a few post-graduate law courses. Data was collected using a paper questionnaire distributed to the students and the teachers at the end of the relevant term. The findings describe students’ perceptions of the way the pilot impacted on the effectiveness of their learning and achieving the learning outcomes of the course and their willingness to provide genuine comments and feedback on the teaching of the course and tutorials, as compared with the traditional end of term evaluations. The findings also describe teachers’ perceptions of the way the pilot impacted on the effectiveness of their teaching, given that students provide their comments half way through the course.