- The purpose of questionnaires is to support teachers in making improvements in teaching and learning.
- Questionnaires are not a mechanism for assessing the performance of members of staff.
- Departments should not compare scores across staff.
- Teachers should receive some kind of instruction in how to interpret and respond to questionnaire responses.
- Open and closed questions elicit different kinds of information and most questionnaires should contain both.
- Closed questions are efficient mechanisms for gleaning information about a range of specific issues.
- Open questions allow students the freedom to discuss what matters most to them and to elaborate on answers provided to closed questions.
- It may be useful to comprise questionnaires of two separate and detachable sections – for example, two A4 sheets. The first contains closed and ranked questions and is submitted anonymously; the second contains open questions and students are requested to identify themselves with these responses.
- There is nothing wrong with ranked questions that elicit responses on an ordered scale – for example, from 1 to 5 – although they have to be used appropriately.
- In analysing them the useful statistics are the proportion of respondents responding in each category.
- Constructing average scores (i.e. averaging the scores for each question across all respondents) is not a sound statistical approach.
- Computing single scores from a pool of questions is fraught with difficulties and can only work in an extremely well-designed questionnaire with a precise objective used in the right way.
- Before designing the questionnaire, think carefully about what kinds of information might be useful – too many questionnaires contain questions that are inappropriate and this is frustrating to the respondents.
- On the questionnaire, group questions into themes – this makes it more comprehensible and attractive to respondents. Questions can be grouped under the following key themes (these are discussed in more depth in section 3.1):
- overall quality indicators;
- open questions;
- student behaviour and status;
- the module;
- skills of the lecturer;
- reading and facilities;
- contribution to learning.
- Make the questionnaire attractive – this will increase the rate and quality of response.
- When analysing questionnaire responses, do not read too much into the results.
