Interpret student feedback: open-ended text responses

Students are asked the open-ended text question:

‘What did you particularly like in this subject?’

Reading and interpreting these comments can provide valuable insights to help you identify and adjust relevant elements of teaching practice. Some aspects to consider when you read comments:

• Do the positive comments/ experiences provide insight into any core goals students had the opportunity to work towards?
• What are the common characteristics in these positive experiences? Do responses across the cohort show consistent themes you can learn from?
• In what ways could your current course be adjusted to further build on these positive themes? What new elements could you look at introducing?

The questions for this topic in each survey are phrased as follows:

• ‘Please enter any comments on your learning experience so far’ (EFS)
• ‘Please suggest any improvements that could be made to this subject’ (SFS)

Take a moment to consider why students might be asking for a particular change. 

• What fundamental need or intention might be driving the requested changes?
• Do you have access to other data or comments which support your interpretation?
• Is there an alternative way to address the core problem or student need?
• How could you trial and evaluate a potential change made in response to key comments?

If you have a lot of data, you could try out an approach like ‘affinity diagramming’ as a more in-depth method for uncovering insights. Affinity diagramming is a common design practice for making sense and drawing key insights out of a broad set of raw user data. A brief breakdown of the process is included below, but there are many online resources illustrating the practice if you’re keen to explore!

1. Establish a goal, e.g. to identify a course characteristic that students appreciate which could also be embedded in other components of the subject. 
2. Add each learner comment to an individual post-it note (either physical or on a digital whiteboard) – ‘I really liked the early group activities’
3. Group comments into similar themes and create a ‘header’ note to describe that theme. Ideally, the header is written in the voice of the student, e.g. notes like ‘I really liked the early group activities’ and ‘Getting feedback from my classmates was really useful’ might be grouped under a header note: ‘I liked the opportunities to work with my peers’.
4. Try to arrange the notes so that you have groups of no more than six under each header. If you have more consider how you might be able to break that set down.
5. You could stop here, or also attempt to group and classify the header cards to identify a smaller number of higher-level insights.