Members of the WVU Faculty Senate Teaching and Assessment Committee have identified successful practices for increasing response rates on the student feedback instrument based on incentive and other strategies used by faculty members who received high numbers of responses on SPOT. Committee members also utilized input from members of the WVU Student Government Association to inform the following suggested practices.
Suggested Practices
Provide extra credit.
First, it is completely acceptable to grant extra credit (e.g., 5 points added to the final grade, dropping the lowest quiz score, etc.) to the whole class, once the response rate gets to an appropriate level (e.g., 50 percent). Keep in mind that the extra credit points should not make up a significant portion (i.e., it should be less than a full letter grade) of the final grade. You can follow the response rates for the class, updating and encouraging the whole class if you choose not to do SPOT within class time.
Log into the Bluera system and click on “Subject Management.”
You can see the class participation rate for each of your courses as shown below:
If you click on the three dots, and then click on “View Respondents,” the entire class list will appear.
Finally, you can click on the “Resend Invitation Emails” link to have the system send another email to those who not yet completed SPOT for your course.
As you can see from the screenshot, the system can send follow up emails to those students who have not yet completed SPOT without identifying those students to you.
Set aside time within class for students to fill out SPOT.
It is also recommended to take a break more toward the middle of class time. You can display the link to the SPOTs for all their courses (https://wvu.bluera.com/wvu) so that students can easily log in and not have to search through emails. You can stay in the room while they fill it out (just remain in front of the room and do not walk around). If you feel there is not enough space for students to feel comfortable in this situation, just step outside the room for about 5 minutes to give them time to complete the feedback form.
Share the impact.
It is important for students to see the impact of the feedback they are providing about their learning and experiences within your classroom. If you utilize the Early Semester Course Feedback (ESCF) instrument, you can make modifications based on student feedback and students will be more likely to fill out SPOT at the end of the course. If you do not use ESCF, we recommend that you share with students the modifications you have made to improve their learning based on feedback from previously taught courses.