Utilizing Plus/Deltas to Solicit Feedback From Students

By: Shannon Hogan

A Plus/Delta on using Plus/Deltas in the classroom.

Plus/Delta evaluations are a fantastic tool to gauge the temperature of your student population, get some well-deserved adulation, and most importantly find out how to best connect with your students. They are easy to use and ripe with information. I find Plus/Delta evaluations very useful for soliciting feedback from students both mid-semester and at the end of the semester.

What is a Plus/Delta you ask? Pluses are fairly self-explanation: what is going well in the classroom. Deltas on the other hand, are ideas for change (hence the delta).

I’ll be honest with you. I get very excited about teaching science (think alpha nerd) and since I’m sort of naturally caffeinated, I sometimes speak (really) fast when it comes to certain topics such as all things microbiology. I always warn students of this at the beginning of the semester and usually at the beginning of each class. Once at Boston College, during a mid-semester Plus/Delta, in a class of over 100 students, one person said that she was shy and that it was hard for her in a class that large to raise her hand and ask me to repeat something. Not having thought of this, I realized that there were probably other students in the class that were shy and maybe had a hard time raising their hand. We came up with a hand gesture that signaled: please slow down and repeat what you just said. You may have seen this gesticulation if you’ve ever passed a police officer at a work detail and you started to go a little too fast through the work zone.

Spoiler alert: The hand gesture totally worked!! And throughout the semester I noticed other presumably shy students using this hand motion as well.

An example of a Plus/Delta from a microbiology class.

Plus/Deltas don’t take up a lot of time and the deltas allow you to really look into what could be more helpful for students as far as your overall teaching goes. Mid-semester evaluations are helpful because you’re checking in to see how to make the class more effective for your audience. End of the semester Plus/Deltas help you find out what went right and what could be potentially helpful for the new group of students next semester. Quite frankly, it’s also a way for students to show appreciation for all of the hard work that you did.

One thing to note is that you don’t want to get defensive when you are discussing the deltas. Here, you’re looking to clarify and understand what a student or students think could make the classroom a more productive environment for learning. Also, you have to tell the students that you may not implement all of the changes. Some are downright impossible. In a mid-semester Plus/Delta I had a student ask if we could change the class meeting time to 8:00 am because she was 1. “a morning person” and 2. “this middle of the day meeting time really screwed with the rest of her day”. I told her that the request could not be granted and also asked her to view the looks of her fellow students regarding her morning meeting time request.

The Plus/Delta has been an important tool in my classroom and I encourage you to try it as well.

#formativefeedback