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MoCAT (Missouri Cares About Teaching) System for Teaching Evaluations

The single-most effective method of improving end-of-semester student evaluations is through the use of some type of early student feedback on teaching coupled with a consultation on how to use the results gathered from that early feedback.

Early feedback forms look similar to the end of semester course evaluations. One important difference, however, is that early feedback is designed to provide feedback to the faculty member before the class is over. In this way, things that are working well can be continued, while meaningful changes can be implemented for things that aren't going well.

ET@MO offers consultations to interpret your results, discuss instructional planning, evaluation and assessment, or incorporating new teaching strategies and tools to address various learning environments and challenges.

How Does it Work?

1. Early in the semester, faculty or TAs e-mail mocat@missouri.edu to request an account
2. Once the account is created, instructors login with their PawPrint ID and password at http://mocat.missouri.edu
3. The instructor can create a new survey, modify an existing one, deploy surveys to students, or view feedback from deployed surveys
4. To get a better response rate, faculty are encouraged to remind students in class to complete the online form, which is sent to the student via their MU email account
5. As feedback is submitted, the data are compiled, averaged and available in their account for the instructor to view
6. On the feedback page, links to helpful teaching resources are available for each section of the survey
7. Faculty are invited to consult with ET@MO staff to interpret data

Benefits of Online Feedback

• Results are available to faculty immediately after data collection
• The online version eliminates taking class time to administer paper forms
• The online version, as with the paper version, is completely anonymous
• Students may complete the forms when they have enough time to provide thoughtful responses, rather than being rushed in class
• Students tend to provide a higher number of written comments and write twice as many words (going into much more detail) than with paper forms
• Although there is a 33% response rate with the online version (compared to 81% with paper forms), the results do not appear substantially different

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