Survey
Teaching students
how to design a survey can be tricky because the process is deceptively easy.
Students think, “Hey, I have taken tons of surveys before. How hard can it be?”
They then proceed to break every rule of good design that you discussed in
class.
A simple, quick,
yet effective activity to teach good survey design is to have your students
take a survey that is horribly designed. I tell my students that I want no
talking and then pass out a survey about internet usage. Every question on the survey is either double barreled, leading,
biased, or has response options that make no sense or overlap. After a few
minutes I tell them to stop and ask what they think of the survey. They
uniformly say it’s awful. Students really like this activity. Typically they
laugh out loud when reading the questions. I have them pair up and identify
everything that is wrong with the questions. As a class we go through each
question picking it apart. We then formulate new questions that don’t violate
any of the basic survey design rules.
The activity is
also beneficial because students get to take home an example of what not to do
that they can compare their work against when creating their own survey.
Pedagogically I really like this activity because it has the students playing
an active role in their education. Also, the “bad survey” is formatted well so
you can tell your students that their survey should look like the example you
gave them, but with much better
questions.
Comments