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設計並編寫問卷
Why use questionnaires?
Questionnaires can help you to get clear and concisely structured feedback from your students or observers. Writing a good questionnaire can be difficult though and you have to think very clearly about what information you want and how you word your questions in order to get that information.
You’ll also need to think about the amount of information your questionnaire will generate and how you will process that information and draw conclusions from it.
Different kinds of questions
There are number of different types of question that you can use in your questionnaire and each of these different types has the strengths and weaknesses.
• Yes / No Questions
These questions are easy to produce, quick for students to answer, and the data they produce is easy to evaluate. You can very easily get data from students by simply asking ‘Did you enjoy that activity?’ Get students who liked it to put up their hand for yes. You count the hands up and you have quickly found out whether the majority of students liked the activity. The problem with this type of question though, is that although you get a quick answer, you don’t get much detailed information. You don’t find out why your students did or didn’t like the activity.
• Multiple choice questions
Giving your students a number of different alternative answers to choose from can also give you some quite useful data and still be fast to process and evaluate. You can use these questions most effectively when the range of possible responses is limited.
For example, If you want to know which of a number of different activities the students found most useful, then listing the activities and asking them to select one can quickly give you some useful data.
You must be careful with multiple choice questions, not to restrict the answers so much that you don’t allow students to give an accurate response or to influence them in their choice of answers.
For example, if you want to evaluate an activity that you felt went badly and you could ask a question like this;
Why did you not complete the activity?
a) because it was boring
b) because I didn’t like the topic
c) because I don’t like speaking
The problem here is that the reason might not be included. It may be that your students didn’t understand the task, or that they wanted more time or one of the reasons could be correct. In cases where you are not sure that you have included all the possibilities it is always good to include an additional option that students can add themselves. This is usually ‘Other’ with a note for them to give their own explanation.
• Ordering
Asking students to order thing is also a useful type of question. This helps you to understand what relative value students put on various aspects of classroom practice. You can ask them to order activities by preference or usefulness. Or you can ask them to order coursebook topics by the degree of interest they have in them.
This kind of data can be harder and more time consuming to process though and students’ relative scales can differ. There may be only one thing I value and the other five I don’t whereas other students could value all six in varying degrees, so you also have to be careful that you don’t interpret things at the bottom of the list as being valueless.
• Open-ended questions
Open-ended questions can be the most effective in getting a lot of accurate and complex data, but this data can be difficult to compare and process. If you have 50 students and you ask an open question, For example; “What do you value about learning English?” Then it’s possible that you will get 50 different answers. These kinds of questions can also generate a lot of data which can then be very time consuming to analyse and which often gives very interesting, though contradictory information.
• Gradients
Gradient type questions can be very quick and easy to administer. These can be as simple as asking your students to award marks out of 10. For example you could ask them to award marks out of ten for a unit of the course book they have just completed. You could ask them to rate a listening or reading activity and give it marks out of ten for how difficult they thought it was.
Again these ratings will be subjective. What one student thinks of as 8 for difficulty could be completely different from the student next to them, but it will give you a quick overall indication.
• What forms of questionnaire
There are a number of different ways you can deliver your questionnaire. You could print up copies and hand them out to students. They could complete them alone at home or as a speaking activity within the lesson. You could create an online questionnaire using a free website like http://www.surveymonkey.com/ or a blog or Wiki.
You could just simply ask questions from the front of the class and ask the students to put up their hand or discuss the questions in open class.
You should think carefully about the number of questions and the amount of time your questionnaire takes. You could just use a single question delivered orally or a whole series of detailed written questions. Be careful though not to make questionnaires too long. If students start to loose interest in the questionnaire, the value of the information they give you will decline.
Anonymity
Your relationship to your students will have a significant effect on the degree of honesty in the answers they give you.
Students who really like or are afraid of their teacher will tend to be less willing to give negative feedback. If you want to remove this influence from your data, make sure your students can give you their information anonymously. This will ensure that the feedback they give you will be more honest and so of greater value to you.
Written by Nik Peachey - January 2008
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