Investigating Strategies for Increasing Student Response Rates to Online-Delivered Course Evaluations

Abstract

Student evaluations of college instruction provide one critical source of information for the improvement of courses, curriculum, and practitioners’ pedagogic efforts. Increasingly, online-delivered course evaluations are being put to use for eliciting student feedback in Web-based as well as face-to-face courses. Two studies were conducted in order to, first, understand the level of student responsiveness to existing online-delivered course evaluations at Northern Arizona University, and, second, to investigate strategies for improving evaluation response rates in a subset of Web-based and face-to-face courses. Findings indicated that a combination of simple and easily implemented strategies was associated with considerably higher student response rates to online-delivered course evaluations than had been attained in existing online-delivered evaluations.