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9. Student feedback from teaching period II, autumn 2020

Last modified by Xwiki VePa on 2025/01/08 07:15

Student feedback was collected using e-lomake on the following courses:

  • Vuorovaikutukset ja aine
  • Perusopintojen laboratoriotyöt I
  • Tieteellinen laskenta I
  • Introduction to quantum physics
  • Quantum mechanics I
  • additional: feedback from teaching assistants

Some general notes on the feedback

Here are some common notes from the collected course feedback:

group work

Group work can be a great way to support sense of community on courses. Some students on the lab course report that they have learned a lot from their peers and found even new friends!

Success of group work depends, of course, a lot on the group in question. Some students have been left very alone as their group has e.g. broke up. The teacher should plan group work well in advance and think how to handle problematic cases. Some groups might need additional support.

Zoom might not be the best tool for remote group work. Students can be encouraged to test out different remote working tools and platforms and to choose the one they like best.

assessing exercises

Some students hope for more written feedback on their exercise solutions. However, to limit the workload of teaching assistants, only light assessment and commenting of solutions is recommended. The recommendations regarding exercise assessment in Recommended code of conduct for courses in Bachelor's programme in physical sciences are the following:

  • exercises returned after deadline will not yield points
  • marking range of exercise questions: 0,1,2:
    • 0   no effort or senseless attempt
    • 1   good attempt
    • 2   contains essentially correct physical and mathematical principles, but does not need to be spotlessly correct

Feedback from teaching assistants

Assistants would like to get more support for teaching from lecturers and the Bachelor's programme. We highly recommend that a weekly meeting of lecturer and TAs is arranged on every course! In the meeting, TAs can e.g. ask the lecturer about assessing exercise solutions.

TAs have encountered some problems with their remote teaching devices. We have collected some instructions for this point here.

TAs raised the issue that students don't seem to attend (remote) exercise sessions. It would be good if lecturers encouraged students to attend both exercise sessions and lectures.

Some TAs hope to get more pedagogical training (something of the scope between of assistant training and university pedagogy courses). First and foremost, we hope that TAs get some pedagogical support in weekly teachers' meetings. Secondly, we are currently trying to find out if we have enough resources to provide more support for assistants.