10 Tips - Improve your Education Survey
Get an A+ On Your Next Education Survey
Zoomerang and our market research parent MarketTools have years of experience in developing good surveys. At Zoomerang, we use our market-leading zPro software to do our own market research, including customer satisfaction surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, and product concept testing.
What is a good survey?
A good survey provides you actionable, clear information to guide your decision-making. Good surveys have higher response rates and higher quality data. Good surveys are easy to fill out and aren’t confusing.
Follow these 10 tips to create great surveys, improve the response rate of your survey, and the quality of the data you gather, by following these basic rules of good surveying.
1. Clearly define the purpose of the survey
Fuzzy goals lead to fuzzy results and the last thing you want to end up with is a set of results that provide no real decision enhancing value. Good surveys have focused objectives that are easily understood. Spend time up front to identify, in writing:
- Why are you creating this survey?
- What do you hope to accomplish with this survey?
How will you use the data you are collecting?
- What decisions do you hope to impact with the results of this survey? (This will later help you identify what data you need to collect in order to make these decisions)
Sounds obvious, but we have seen plenty of surveys where a few minutes of planning could have made the difference between receiving quality responses (responses that are useful as inputs to decisions) or un-interpretable data.
Consider the case of the software firm that wanted to find out what new functionality was most important to customers. The survey asked ‘How can we improve our product?’ The resulting answers ranged from ‘Make it easier’ to ‘Add an update button on the recruiting page’. While interesting information this data is not really helpful for the product manager who wanted to take an itemized list for the development team with customer input as a prioritization variable.
Spending time identifying the objective might have helped the survey creators determine: 1) are we trying to understand our customers’ perception of our software in order to identify areas of improvement e.g. hard to use, time consuming, unreliable or 2) are we trying to understand the value of specific enhancements. They would have been better off asking customers to please rank from 1 – 5 the importance of adding X new functionality.
Upfront planning helps ensure that the survey asks the right questions to meet the objective and generate useful data.
2. Keep the survey short and focused
Short and focused helps with both quality and quantity of response. It is generally better to focus on a single objective than try to create a master survey that covers multiple objectives.
Shorter surveys generally have higher response rates and lower abandonment among survey takers. It’s human nature to want things to be quick and easy – once a survey taker loses interest they simply abandon the task – leaving you to determine how to interpret that partial data set (or whether to use it all).
Make sure each of your questions is focused on helping to meet your stated objective. Don’t toss in ‘nice to have’ questions that don’t directly provide data to help you meet your objectives.
To be certain that the survey is short; time a few people taking the survey. Zoomerang research (along with Gallop and others) has shown that the survey should take 5 minutes or less to complete. 6 – 10 minutes is acceptable but we see significant abandonment rates occurring after 11 minutes.
3. Keep the questions simple
Make sure your questions get to the point and avoid the use of jargon. We on the Zoomerang team have often received surveys with questions along the lines of. “When was the last time you used our RGS?” (What’s RGS?) Don’t assume that your survey takers are as comfortable with your acronyms as you are.
Try to make your questions as specific and direct as possible. Compare: What has your experience been working with our HR team? To: How satisfied are you with the response time of our HR team?
4. Use closed ended questions whenever possible
Closed ended questions give survey-takers specific choices (e.g. Yes or No), making it easier to analyze results. Closed ended questions can take the form of yes/no, multiple choice or rating scale. Open-ended question allow people to answer a question in their own words. Open-ended questions are great supplemental questions and may provide useful qualitative information and insights. However, for collating and analysis purposes, close-ended questions are preferable.
5. Keep rating scale questions consistent through the survey
Rating scales are a great way to measure and compare sets of variables. If you elect to use rating scales (e.g. from 1 – 5) keep it consistent throughout the survey. Use the same number of points on the scale and make sure meanings of high and low stay consistent throughout the survey. Also, use an odd number in your rating scale to make data analysis easier. Switching your rating scales around will confuse survey takers, which will lead to untrustworthy responses.
6. Logical ordering
Make sure your survey flows in a logical order. Begin with a brief introduction that motivates survey takers to complete the survey (e.g. “Help us improve our service to you. Please answer the following short survey.”). Next, it is a good idea to start from broader-based questions and then move to those narrower in scope. It is usually better to collect demographic data and ask any sensitive questions at the end (unless you are using this information to screen out survey participants). If you are asking for contact information, place that information last.
7. Pre-test your survey
Make sure you pre-test your survey with a few members of your target audience and/or co-workers to find glitches and unexpected question interpretations.
8. Send survey invitations Monday through Thursday
In general, we have found that avoiding Friday and the weekend helps improve results. In addition, Mondays mornings should be avoided because many people wade through their in-box and delete as many messages as possible.
9. Consider sending several reminders
While not appropriate for all surveys, sending out reminders to those who haven’t previously responded can often provide a significant boost in response rates.
10. Use Zoomerang education templates
Zoomerang offers a number of education-related survey templates to help you get started, from Student Satisfaction and Faculty Satisfaction to Course Evaluations. Browse the Education templates to save time on your next survey and to get ideas for collecting feedback to improve your school, college or university.
