Category: Course Evaluation

As the semester is coming to an end, the Equity Diversity and Inclusion Committee would like to share some resources for faculty members who are teaching courses in the Psychology Department.

At the beginning of the year, faculty received information on how to better support our students given the pandemic and surge in racial justice movement (see here: https://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/about/support-students.htm). Now that we’re nearing the end of spring semester, the EDI Committee has put together a series of optional course evaluation measures that you can choose to distribute to your students. This survey will be helpful in determining if any changes you have made to your course impacted students in a positive way, or to assess potential future changes to your course. 

The course evaluation items that Maria Garay, Rachel Wang, and Hasan Abdel-Nabi created are intended to promote anti-racist initiatives, which is the focal point of the EDI committee’s work. If you would like to know more about why the course evaluation items are focused on racial identity, please re-visit the Ways to Support All Students resource on our website or read the Department Statement in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and the pandemic of racism in the United States (https://tufts.app.box.com/v/psy-dept-statement-2020-june). 

This is a word document with the set of questions we recommend. You may choose some, all, or a modified form of any of these questions for your class, as appropriate. One part of the EDI committee’s mission is to support students of color; therefore, it is important to consider perceptions of the class and class materials from the perspectives of your students of color. This is why we recommend that, in some cases, it is helpful to include questions that ask about the students’ racial identities. However, it is important to keep in mind that, especially in small classes, but also in large classes that are racially homogeneous, such questions may make it easy to identify students who respond. We encourage you to preserve the anonymity of student responses by responsibly selecting items you believe are most beneficial for understanding your class climate. If you would like to receive the full set of questions programmed into a Qualtrics survey, this is a .qsf file that you can download and upload into Qualtrics.  

Should you decide to use any of these questions, the data you collect from your survey will go to you, of course, and not the EDI committee. If you believe, after distributing the survey and reviewing the responses, that there are additional changes you would like to make to your course, some resources to assist in the process would include:

1) Contact CELT (Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching; https://provost.tufts.edu/celt/), as they have many professional services that can help better your classroom and teaching.

2) You may also review the Ways to Support All Students resources, as there are many resources under the “Promote Anti-Racist Values” section.

3) Lastly, you can contact the EDI committee (chair: keith.maddox@tufts.edu), as we would be more than happy to think through additional ways for revising course content and/or climate.

We hope this resource will be useful to you all as we begin to approach the end of the semester.

Thank you!