Insight on how students and teachers feel about the quarterly Student Experience Survey

By Margot Camp 23

Four times a year in the Catlin Gabel School (CGS) Upper School, each teacher sends a survey to the students of their class. The survey is called the Student Experience Survey, and it asks the students for feedback on how the class is going.

The purpose of the survey is for teachers to receive data and feedback that they would only be able to receive from students. 

Derek Kanereck, the Academic Dean of the CGS Upper School explained how he developed the survey three years ago when he first started working at CGS. He said he wanted to shift it from asking questions about specific guidelines for teachers to being more about how students were making sense of their experience in their courses.

He shared how he wanted to adapt the survey to “routinely give teachers a chance to learn about the impact of their teaching.” 

The survey is meant to help teachers get feedback from students and for them to be able to see the gap between their intentions and the actual learning experience. 

In an article from Edutopia, called “Improving Teaching With Expert Feedback - From Students,” high school teacher Christopher Pagan developed a system to improve students’ performance in his class.

The system he developed was similar to the one at CGS. The students are given time in class to take the survey anonymously without being in the presence of the teacher. He then reviewed the survey with his students and went over the feedback they gave. 

“The surveys help students reflect, become more self-aware, and adopt agency and ownership over their learning,” said Pagan. “The student surveys allowed them to reflect and realize that if they want to reach their goals, they're going to have to put in more work, and that I'm there to help them along the way.”

Pagan emphasized that the survey can help students hold themselves accountable for their own learning, too.

CGS math teacher Tyler Reuter shared some thoughts about how the survey helps him as a teacher. “I can hear from students on what is going well and is appreciated, and also what is going poorly in class and how it could be improved,” he explained. 

Reuter also mentioned that he thinks students could feel some burnout surrounding the survey because of the time period in which they take it and because they take it for every class they are in. 

Along with possible survey fatigue, Reuter shared that the survey results could be affected by bias. “The length of the surveys can lead to some biased results because students simply want to just get it done and complete the rather large number of questions as quickly as they can,” said Reuter.

This is not the only bias that might play a role in the survey results teachers receive. Other biases such as racial, gender, and cultural biases, etc. could also be involved. 

A survey was sent to CGS students asking about their perspective on how effectively teachers respond to the feedback offered by students in the quarterly surveys. 22 students responded to the survey. 

In response to the question, “Do you feel like teachers adapt their class effectively after reading student feedback?” 51.9% of the students responded No, 18.2% of the students responded Yes and 22.7% of the students responded Other. 

One student elaborated by saying, “It depends on the teacher and usually if they do take feedback into account, the changes slowly wear off and we have to recommend the same things again.”

The most common response to this question was some variant of “Teachers address the survey but don’t change” meaning they notice that teachers go over the feedback and acknowledge it without making changes to the class. 

While 26.3% of the students replied Yes, 73.7% of the students replied No to the question, “Do you think the student experience survey is effective at changing/altering the student experience?” 

“I think that it’s valuable to give students the opportunity to voice their opinions and give feedback on classes, but there’s no real way to hold teachers accountable for adapting that feedback into their courses.” a student explained. 

While similar responses were common, there were some students who felt that teachers respond in ways that do alter the students’ experience.