Using Surveys In Education – A Few Examples

Gone are the days when you used to draft out a survey, get it printed, photocopied and distributed before reminding the participants that they must write everything in block letters.

Today online survey sites are competing to give you the most in features that suit each survey maker’s needs. So how can you best make use of surveys in education?

School Administration

You can always use online surveys to get parents or students’ feedback when introducing a new activity, event or resource. Moreover, once a year you could send out a standardized survey to each staff member at your school and find out about their professional developments needs. Plus online surveys are hassle free and only take the time it would take you to punch in a couple of keys.  Therefore you can conveniently use these to gauge interest in an upcoming event or activity for your school. Also a lot of school administrators use questionnaires to get feedback on the work environment.

Teachers

Online surveys are a very resourceful tool when it comes to collecting information from your students, for example for researching your student’s interests. Some teachers make use of survey questionnaires to know where new or transfer student’s prior knowledge stands for upcoming school work.  And that is not all, you can send students surveys to get feedback on previous work and check for its success or how it could be improved. Check out Surveyrock.com; you can use our tools to design a survey suited specifically to your needs.

Students

Students can themselves make use of online surveys too. For example, students can use surveys to collect information for an assignment. They can use it for collecting feedback on something they may have created. Plus they can analyze their results using our charts or export the raw data to a spreadsheet for analysis and use this to make further decisions or to simply reflect on what they have learned.

Think about what online surveys can really do in education. When students make their own surveys they need to have a good understanding of the task and content; only then are they able to form adequate questions. In addition to this, students also learn how to pose appropriate questions that will retrieve the necessary information. Some teachers encourage students to work with surveys as they believe it boosts their knowledge on how to interpret answers in the form of figures and graphs and to gain insight on how people really think about certain topics (as most surveys are anonymous). The bottom line is that this is a great way for students to reflect and improve upon their learning.  Online surveys are a prime example of strategic and innovative learning.