system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How to get good student evaluation scores?

I am an instructor in a state university and have not been getting good student evaluations. I try my best, am easy with grades and try to be as interactive as possible. Please let me know how I could improve in getting better student evaluation scores.
gpt
If your university offers any pedagogy lectures or classes, I’d strongly recommend looking into them. Often what leads to low scores is a combination of different things, only some of which you may have control over (eg higher grade averages for a class often correlate with higher evaluations, but are the higher grades because you graded easily or because the students learned more effectively and therefore achieved better scores themselves because you taught well?). 

For example, I’m an a pedagogy course atm, and one thing we’ve practiced recently is ‘transparent teaching’ which is strongly correlated with higher evaluations *and* better results for traditionally underperforming or under-represented students (eg first gen college students). Transparent teaching involves being as explicit as possible in: a) why you are assigning a certain task/homework/project/exam — what skills will they develop from it or how will it demonstrate the skills they’ve learned; b) the exact steps (broken down or ‘deconstructed’ as thoroughly as possible) they will need to take to complete the task; c) how you will evaluate their performance on the task — what qualifies as both a ‘sufficient’ and ‘exemplary/above and beyond’ and why those qualities are important and related to the skills they are developing in your course. Transparent teaching is, unfortunately, sometimes easier said than done, but in general when students are told exactly *why* they are doing something and exactly what they need to do in order to succeed and excel, it makes them feel more confident and more trusting in their instructor.

If your university doesn’t offer any pedagogy lectures (even one-offs can be helpful), try How Learning Works: 7 Research Based Principles for Smart Learning or Teaching What You Don’t Know by Therese Huston, which were both used in the course I’m taking so they’re probably decent introductions.

There’s also things like backward course design and flipped classrooms that might be worth looking into.