June 2025 | Oceanography
83
THE OCEANOGRAPHY CLASSROOM
TAP
TEACHING ANALYSIS POLL FOR STUDENT FEEDBACK
By Robert Kordts, Mahaut de Vareilles, Kjersti Daae, Eirun Gandrud, Anne D. Årvik, and Mirjam S. Glessmer
Many university instructors receive end-of-semester responses
to standardized student questionnaires (student evaluations of
teaching, SETs) collected through online systems. But how well
do SETs work to improve teaching and student engagement in
learning? Research has found a large number of challenges and
problems with SETs, including, (1) they do not assess teaching
quality; (2) they often use quantitative, predefined scales that
leave little space for additional comments; (3) they often have
unclear goals, with course improvement not being the main one;
and (4) there is often little student engagement, indicated by low
response rates for online evaluation.
At the Geophysical Institute (GFI), University of Bergen
(UiB), we consider high-quality feedback from students to
instructors important in order to improve course outcomes.
However, we wanted to move away from SETs and so looked
for alternative feedback methods that would better represent
student views (respecting both their qualitative and quanti
tative aspects) and could be presented to the instructors in a
motivating way.
We chose to experiment with the Teaching Analysis Poll
(TAP; Hawelka, 2019) that was, to our knowledge, developed
at the University of Virginia and has been used in different
higher-education institutions, countries (e.g., United States,
Germany, Switzerland), and disciplines. The recommended
TAP procedure for face-to-face classes takes about 30 minutes
and is performed by an external facilitator who collects student
feedback on three aspects, which are then communicated back
to the class instructor:
1. Which aspects of the course facilitate your learning?
2. Which aspects of the course hinder your learning?
3. What suggestions do you have for improving the obstructive
aspects?
Box 1 provides a detailed description of the TAP procedure as
employed by the authors.
The method can easily be adapted to different teaching sit
uations. As facilitators, we have experience with TAP in both
small courses with two or three student groups and very large
courses with several hundred students; both face-to-face and
online (using online collaborative writing and poll tools); and
with both TAP on the course level and TAP on the study-
program level (with students commenting on aspects related
to the program curriculum). See the variants described in
Johannsen and Meyer (2023).
At GFI, TAP implementation was part of a larger educa
tion initiative, iEarth Center for Integrated Earth Science
Education, and of an ongoing collaboration with the UiB uni
versity pedagogy group. Between 2022 and 2024, we conducted
seven TAPs in selected geoscience courses (many of which had
a focus on active learning), and two courses repeated the TAP
after one year. People involved were administrative staff at GFI,
a university pedagogy colleague, and two students who served
as TAP co-facilitators and helped analyze the data.
Because one of TAP’s characteristics is confidentiality, we
will not detail TAP results. However, to provide an overview
of the topics mentioned, we analyzed all TAP reports based
on the categories identified by Hawelka (2019). Hawelka’s sys
tem includes eight main categories and several subcategories,
ranging from comments about interactions between students
and instructors to students’ understanding of the task, their
motivation, their learning strategies, and their self-regulation
for learning, to general resources and overall ratings about
the course and about its structural conditions. Table 1 shows
samples of the Hawelka (2019) categories that appeared most
often in the TAPs together with examples of students’ positive
or negative quotes.
TAP results provide not only general positive or nega
tive views (Category No. 7) but also comments on more spe
cific points, such as the learning materials (Category 6.2) or the
lecturer’s presentation style (Category 1.1). In fact, most com
ments found in the TAP were about aspects that the instruc
tors typically can change. Rather surprising to us, the students
commented on aspects that support their learning progress
(Category 5.2), specifying positive and critical examples. This
indicates that the TAP stimulates the students to evaluate what
others, such as the instructors, do, as well as what they need for
their own learning success. This is a huge advantage of the TAP
compared to traditional SET methods. Finally, some TAP feed
back relates to aspects that instructors alone typically cannot
change (Category 8).