Course Feedback and Evaluation: What to Say, Examples, and How to Report Findings

Good course feedback names a specific moment, says what effect it had, and suggests what you would change. Judge the course against what it promised to teach, not against how likeable the trainer was. One precise comment about pacing in session three is worth twenty ratings of “good”.

This is for two readers who rarely speak to each other: the person filling in the form, and the person holding two hundred completed forms wondering what to do next.

How do you write good feedback for a course?

Write it the way you would want to receive it: tied to something that actually happened, sorted by what it concerns, and specific enough to act on.

1. Anchor each point to a moment. “Session two ran forty minutes past the break” gives the trainer something to fix. “Timing could be better” gives them nothing.
2. Separate content, delivery, pacing and materials. A trainer can be excellent and the handouts still unusable, and a single overall score hides which it was.
3. Say what the effect on you was. “The slides moved on before I had copied the worked example, so I lost the rest of that section” locates the problem exactly.
4. Offer the change you would make. You do not have to be right. A concrete suggestion is easier to weigh than a complaint.
5. Check it against the stated objectives. If the course said you would leave able to plan a mixed-attainment sequence, say whether you can. Objectives written with a real performance verb make that test easy to apply.
6. Write the praise as carefully as the criticism. Most people invert this and produce three warm sentences plus one sharp one. The warm sentences are then discarded as politeness.

Leave out comments about the trainer as a person rather than as a teacher, and leave out the word “fine”, which is what people write once they have decided the form goes nowhere.

What is an example of positive feedback for a course?

A good example of positive feedback names what worked and why, so the trainer can repeat it on purpose. “Great session” cannot be repeated. “You stopped every fifteen minutes and made us explain the idea back” can.

Area	Vague version	Usable version
Content	”Really useful content"	"The retrieval practice section gave me three routines I can use with Year 9 on Monday.”
Delivery	”Great trainer"	"Stopping every fifteen minutes to have us explain the idea back caught two misunderstandings in my group.”
Pacing	”Good pace"	"Ninety minutes on one technique was right. Nothing was rushed and I never had to catch up.”
Materials	”Nice handouts"	"The one-page planner is the only CPD handout I have kept on my desk.”

Every usable version identifies a mechanism. Praise that reports a mood tells the course designer the room was happy, which changes nothing about next term. The same test applies to criticism: “poorly organised” is a mood, while “the pre-reading arrived the night before, so half the room had not done it” is a mechanism, and mechanisms can be fixed.

What should a course evaluation form ask?

Ask only about things you are willing to change, and ask them one at a time. A question nobody will act on spends attention the useful questions needed.

• One idea per question. “Was the content relevant and well presented?” gives you a score you cannot act on, because you will never know which half of it moved.
• Pair every rating with a free-text prompt. Scales tell you where to look. Free text tells you what to do. “What makes you say that?” under each scale is enough.
• Ask a behaviour question. “What will you do differently in the next two weeks?” is the most valuable line on any evaluation form. It gives an early transfer signal and makes the participant commit while they are still in the room.
• Ask what to cut. People will list what to add all day and never volunteer what to remove. Ask directly: if this course had to be an hour shorter, which part would you drop?
• Keep the trainer’s name off the scale questions unless the form is part of an appraisal. Ratings attached to a person drift towards likeability.
• Ask twice. A form at the end measures reaction while the biscuits are still out. Three lines sent six weeks later tell you whether anything survived contact with a timetable.

However carefully you word it, an end-of-course form measures reaction and little else. Whether the training changed anything is a separate measurement problem with its own methods.

How do you present training needs analysis results?

Present training needs analysis (TNA) results as a short ranked list of gaps, each with its evidence and a proposed response. Nobody wants the raw data. They want to know what you are asking them to fund, and why this rather than that.

A readout that survives a leadership meeting has six parts:

1. The three or four gaps you want a decision on. Not the fourteen you found. Rank them, and say what the ranking is based on.
2. The evidence behind each gap. Which sources agreed: survey, lesson observation, outcomes data, exit interviews. Say where they disagreed, because someone in the room has heard the counter-example.
3. Need separated from want. Requests cluster around topics people enjoy. Gaps cluster around things people avoid. The overlap is smaller than anyone hopes.
4. The gaps training will not close. Some arrive labelled as training needs and are really workload or timetabling problems. Saying so protects the budget you are actually asking for.
5. A cost and a slot against each proposal. A need with no INSET slot and no budget line is a wish with a footnote.
6. The decision you want, written as a sentence someone can agree to. Include the date you need it by.

Keep the readout to a page and the data in an appendix. Collecting and analysing the evidence is a separate job, covered in the five steps of a training needs analysis.

How do you tell people what changed?

Send a short “you said, we did” note within a fortnight, naming what you changed, what you decided not to change, and why. The second list carries more weight than the first.

Feedback dries up when it vanishes. If the same three complaints return every year and the course runs unaltered, staff correctly conclude the form is a ritual and next year’s responses come back as single words. One rejected request published with an honest reason does more for response rates than another reminder email.

Each change then needs an owner and a date, which is where evaluation debriefs quietly fail. Everyone agrees session three needs rewriting. Nobody agrees who is rewriting it. For that step, Projan holds the debrief in Microsoft Teams and presses for the specifics people skip: which session changes, who is doing it, before which cohort. The agreed actions leave as tasks in the tools the team already uses.

Frequently asked questions

What do you say when evaluating a course you did not enjoy? Describe the gap between what was advertised and what happened, and keep it on the session rather than the person. Something like: the outcome promised was planning a mixed-attainment sequence, the day covered behaviour instead, so I left without the thing I came for. Then name the single change that would have made the biggest difference.

Should course feedback be anonymous? Usually yes for the standard form. Named feedback from a new teacher about a senior colleague’s session is not free feedback, whatever you tell people. Anonymity does cost you the ability to follow up on an interesting comment, so add an optional name field and one line explaining who reads the responses and what happens to them.

What is the difference between course feedback and course evaluation? Feedback is what one participant says about their experience. Evaluation is the judgement the organisation makes about whether the course was worth running, using feedback as one input alongside attendance, assessment results and later observation. Feedback is evidence. Evaluation is a decision, and a decision made on one source of evidence is a guess.

How many questions should a course evaluation form have? Enough to cover content, delivery, pacing, materials and intended action, which usually lands between six and ten. Past ten, completion rates drop and free-text boxes fill with single words. If you need more depth than that, interview a sample of six participants properly instead of asking everybody more questions.

Feedback is only as useful as it is specific, and the form either invites specificity or prevents it. Name a mechanism when you write a comment, ask only about things you are prepared to change, and tell people afterwards what you did with their answers.