Incorporating Daily Anonymous Surveys into Lectures Thomas Truong Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Daily Anonymous Surveys Short, anonymous surveys with questions focused on improving certain aspects of the lecture were given to the students to before every class. Students were given a physical copy of the survey to encourage participation. Emphasis was placed on the importance of filling out the survey with full honesty. Questions collected feedback on lecture pacing, content, and delivery style. Entirely formative assessment. No marking and the feedback is used only to inform the instructor of their teaching or any specific areas of their teaching they would like feedback on. Questions to explore Course Information Is there a concept where you would like to have another worked problem on or explanation of? Was there anything taught today that was confusing and not fully understood? Were the worked today problems adequately challenging? Teaching practicum involved teaching three 50 minute in ENCM 509: Fundamentals of Biometric Systems Design Topics to be covered were: Set theory Probability Theory Bayesian networks and their applications The course serves as an introduction to many topics related to biometric systems and the students are expected to master each topic to the first three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy1: remembering, understanding, and applying. The students included majors and non-majors with varying levels of knowledge of pre-requisite material. My course outcomes were the following: Students will have the fundamental knowledge behind the probability theory and set theory related to Bayesian networks. Students will be able to apply their probability and set theory knowledge to calculate various probabilities in any given Bayesian Network How can instructors effectively use a daily anonymous survey forms to improve their students’ learning? Will students cooperate in providing enough constructive feedback to the instructor to be useful? How was the pacing of the class? Examples of questions from the survey. Outcome and Discussion The majority of the students attending the class filled out the survey each day. The students and provided constructive feedback to the more focused questions. More general questions were often met with short and not-so-useful comments. Questions regarding difficulty of the content and material were often met with contradicting responses. Overall, the sentiment of the students were generally positive with regards to the surveys. They did not mind having to spend some time during the class filling them out. 1 Bloom, B. S., Englehart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). The Taxonomy of educational objectives, handbook I: The Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay Co., Inc.