Revisiting student evaluations: Feedback for quality improvement in academic nursing while addressing educator...

The challenges in nursing education programs provoke strong reactions that often have limited outlets. In their current form, anonymous Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) may emphasize customer satisfaction over teaching effectiveness, encourage non-constructive comments, and lead to faculty anxiety and distress, ultimately hampering teaching careers, especially for faculty from historically minoritized groups.

To outline a method for extracting useful narrative comments and managing the emotional realities of SET, offer a course of action and stimulate dialogue about SET in nursing education.

Eight semesters of SET in one mental health nursing course were qualitatively coded to develop a method to distill feedback in a less volatile manner.

Revisiting presentation of SET comments may reduce emotion and bias and increase usefulness for faculty and administrators.

While we await clear alternatives to SET, there are ways to render the feedback accurately while inflicting less harm.