Standardised Student Evaluation of Teaching
                      ~ ANUSET

ANUSET is a standardised service for obtaining Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET). It is available to all teaching staff at the ANU who wish to conduct student evaluations of their courses, or their large or small group teaching.

ANUSET provides a summative evaluation. That is, it is usually conducted toward the end of a block of teaching and gives students the chance to "sum up" their perceptions of the overall effectiveness or the overall impact of that teaching on their learning. It is not designed to obtain detailed information of the sort necessary to introduce changes to courses. For course development purposes ANUSET's standardised questions need to be complemented with information from other sources, for e.g., the lecturer's own reflections on the course, course reviews by colleagues, assessment results, or interpretation of students' responses to specific aspects of a course.

Faculty members wishing to use ANUSET for the first time should personally contact Mr Robin Collins in CEDAM on ext 54769 two weeks before the evaluation is due and no later than two weeks before the end of semester (requests for evaluations will not usually be taken after this time). Faculty members who have used ANUSET before should contact their local administrator to request the appropriate forms. CEDAM staff can assist in interpretation of the statistical report and students' comments.

Survey forms are available from the CEDAM office. Do NOT use photocopies of forms as the automated system cannot process photocopies. Form types were revised in 2003 so if you intend to use forms from previous years please check with CEDAM's Evaluation area on 54594 or via evaluation@anu.edu.au. It is intended to substantially revise the ANUSET process in 2008.

It is not necessary to wait until the end of the semester to have an evaluation done. Evaluations of lecturing and tutoring can take place 6 or 7 weeks into the semester whereas course evaluations may take place from week 10. It is important that all staff involved in teaching should be considering during the semester whether they would like to evaluate their course/teaching. It should not be a last minute decision at the end of semester.

ANUSET is automated for efficiency. The evaluations are made by students filling in machine-readable forms which are then processed automatically to provide aggregated information to use when thinking about changes, or in support of applications for promotion, tenure or awards. The machine-readable forms are available from CEDAM, and CEDAM will supervise the automatic processing of the data once the filled-in forms are returned. Open-ended Comments Forms are also available to glean more formative and specific student feedback and can complement student fixed-choice questionnaires.

The major research streams that the ANUSET system is based on are the SEEQ (Marsh & Dunkin, 1992) and CEQ (Ramsden, 1991). These both have extensive theoretical and empirical underpinnings spanning at least two decades. In addition to the research literature and interest group input, the form development process has included the following: the forms were redesigned in light of student comments, response patterns were analysed to detect redundant items, there was input from professional form designers and teaching staff, and the forms were pilotted on groups of ANU students.

The forms were revised last in Second Semester 2003 to allow lecturers/tutors to add several of their own questions. If teaching staff would like to know more about the evaluation options, or have not used the service before then please contact CEDAM's Evaluation area on extension 54769 or via evaluation@anu.edu.au.

At present, (2007), there are four form types with fixed response questions and one asking for students' comments. The forms have the option for lecturers to gather responses to questions they have designed and, for example, displayed via an overhead projector. Suggestions for the wording of optional questions have been compiled in an item bank . Image of the form types are available and the form types are:

• Form A: Large Group Teaching (e.g. Lecturing)
• Form B: Small Group Teaching (e.g. Tutoring)
• Form C: Course Evaluation
• Form E: Flexibly Delivered Courses (Delivered mostly online)
• Open-Ended Comments Form