The most important function of cour

The most important function of course evaluations is to help you develop professionally as a teacher. The Arts and Sciences course evaluation was developed with that purpose in mind. The more actively engaged students are in a course of study, the more successfully they learn. For this reason questions about student engagement come before questions about an instructor's performance. Well designed courses create a structured but open-ended environment that encourages students to take primary responsibility for their learning, motivates and facilitates their continued engagement, and offers them ample opportunities for assessment of and reflection on their progress.When students evaluate courses and the faculty who teach them, bias sometimes plays a role, especially when instructors are perceived as belonging to a population under-represented in the faculty ranks. Such biases may reflect attitudes that stereotype race, gender, religion, ethnic origin and age. Students may be unaware of the biases that affect them, or they may express them quite deliberately. In either case, faculty members who suspect that course evaluations reflect such bias should not hesitate to speak with their department chair, their dean or the director of DCAL.Evaluations also signal to students what the institution thinks are the most important features of learning and prompt them to reflect on their experiences in your course.Before you look over your most recent set of