5 Strategies For Effective Student Surveys
.png)
What is the best way to make student surveys? What student questions should we ask? How do we increase student engagement and response rates? These are often the questions asked, so we have made a student survey guide with 5 proven strategies for improving your student surveys. To increase your student response rates and ask the right questions, you need a clear plan and a simple strategy.
“We chose StudentPulse because we wanted to zoom out to consider and understand the entire student journey - not just the quality of teaching and similar programme focused aspects.
Their solution and microsurveys made this whole process much faster, agile and uniform than each programme doing it separately.”
Kris Achten
Project Manager for International Degree Programmes, KdG
This will help your students while filling out the surveys, but also help you internally as you will know which colleague or department will benefit from knowing the answers. The main objective of making student surveys is to use their feedback to improve the student experience and to strengthen the academic performance.
To ensure high student response rates, it’s important to have a clear plan for how students will access your student survey and needs to be easy for them to do so.
For that reason, it’s recommended that you provide a link that takes them directly to the survey. This link should be provided to the student on a platform that they are already using at your university, making it easier for them to access, thus increasing the number of completed surveys.
Another proven strategy is to include the surveys in the daily routines in the classrooms. QR codes are a great way to make sure the students are filling in the surveys, and an easy way for teachers to distribute the survey.
What survey questions should be asked? This is a common question when finding effective ways to make student surveys. Often you can focus too much on the questions, and not the relevance of them, which is why It’s important to consider when you are asking questions. As an example, if you are asking questions about the first weeks of the school year, you want to only include questions that are relevant for this period. Students' motivation to answer surveys is increased when the questions they are being asked are relevant to their current situation. Most often, we speak with institutions that are good at defining the survey purpose (“the why”), but haven't put much thought into the colleagues expected to use the results (“the who”). It might seem like a small, insignificant detail, but when it comes to taking the results from the desk to actual actions, it is essential to understand the focus and incentives of your internal (and external) stakeholders.
When you ask questions to students, it’s understandable that you might want to ask as many questions as possible. However, limiting the amount of questions has proven to yield better results. If the students experience too many questions in one survey, they’re likely to get questionnaire fatigued which can result in them not completing the surveys or not providing comprehensive or genuine responses. In general, we recommend a maximum of 10 questions per survey. In connection to this, it’s important to mention that the amount of questions should also be based on how comprehensive the questions are. If you include comprehensive questions that require the students to think deeply, you might consider asking fewer questions per survey and sending out surveys more often instead. This is how StudentPulse microsurveys work, by asking a few questions once a month. This approach allows you to keep track of how your students are doing on a more regular basis and gives you the opportunity to improve potential issues faster.
When is the best time to send out surveys to students? Are students reaching exams, are they about to graduate, has an unforeseen event (like a corona lockdown) taken place recently, etc.? If you are looking for effective strategies for student surveys, you need to consider the phase the students are in. The student questions need to be relevant, but you also need to send out the surveys at the right time and phase.
As you might know, we like to see the students’ education as a journey. This means that the student goes through different phases during their education. For that reason, the questions we recommend to ask your students are influenced by what phase the students are currently in and any unexpected events that might occur. This way, we ensure that we ask the students about what is important to them at that specific time, providing the most relevant feedback for your institution. Don’t wait until the end of the course or semester, get real-time data by sending out surveys to students throughout their educational journey.
To be more specific: imagine that you are a student yourself at that specific point in time. What would be on top of your mind?
“The reason we have chosen StudentPulse is because we need a setup that continuously adjusts to the context of our students' journey.
To support them the best way we need their honest inputs right here, right now in an easy understandable way and StudentPulse gives us that".
Helle Hansen
Student Engagement & Mentoring, Flemming Efterskole
The 5 strategies for effective student surveys all follow the same student feedback cycle. In order to achieve an effective student survey, we recommend that these 3 steps are considered:
Mastering student communication, participation, and completion. Building a survey strategy that continuously motivates students to participate and yields high quality data in return.
Building a simple setup to be used by those working with the student experience every day. Identifying pains and issues and linking them with student improvement suggestions.
Converting feedback into smaller actions that improve the experience right now, and bigger actions that improve the fundamental experience. And communicating back to students.
With these 5 proven and effective ways to improve student surveys, the next step is to find the right setup to ensure your strategies are successful. At StudentPulse, you can use our student survey templates and our student questions to improve your work with student feedback. We have made a student feedback platform that gives you the tools to become a student survey expert.
