How Do You Motivate Your Students to Answer Your Student Surveys?
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At StudentPulse, we believe that a very efficient way to improve as a university is to ask your students for feedback on how to do so. However, a prerequisite to get feedback, is to get your students to respond to your surveys so you can get data that you can use to improve. For that reason, we will share some of our knowledge in this field combined with our own experiences on how to succeed with student surveys.
1. What’s the purpose — and how do you communicate it?
Before you ask your students for feedback, make sure that the students know why it is important that they complete the surveys. It is very important that you emphasise that the reason for collecting feedback is so that you improve as a university, and thus improve their student experience. In connection to this, it is important that the students experience that their feedback will help them now and not only help students in the future. This means that you will have to ask questions that are relevant for the current students at a time that is relevant for them as well.
2. How to access the survey
It is important that it is easy for students to access the survey. For that reason, you should provide a link for them that will take them directly to the survey. This link should be provided to the student on a platform that they are already using at your university as this will make it easier for them to access the survey which increases the numbers of completed surveys.
3. Mandatory or optional
When looking at completion rates, it means a lot how your university is communicating about your surveys. In connection to this, you should decide whether you wish to and/or have the possibility to make your surveys mandatory. When communicating to your students that it is expected from them that they complete the surveys, you will most likely see higher completion rates from your students. It is very important that you get feedback from as many different students as possible. This ranges from the very happy students to the very unhappy students, but it is equally important that you hear from the students that are neutral as these students can become very happy students if you know what they need. On the other hand, they can easily become unhappy students if you do not get feedback from them. For that reason, you should consider making your student surveys mandatory for your students or at least communicate that completing your surveys is expected from them. In order to hear from all of your students, it is better to have a 2 minute mandatory survey than a 10 minute optional survey. In order to motivate your students, you can once again emphasise what the student will gain from completing the surveys, namely that it provides an opportunity to improve their student experience.
4. Gain vs. Loss Framing
A small tip to be aware of when you send out your student surveys is to emphasise what the students will lose if they don’t complete the surveys rather than emphasising what they will gain from completing it. Research has shown that making use of loss framing instead of gain framing is associated with higher response rates on surveys for instance. Due to this, it might be a good idea to communicate with loss framing in mind both when you send out your student surveys and when you communicate about them. This could for instance be by stating: “When you don’t complete a survey, you miss out on the chance to improve your student experience”.
5. Timing
When sending out a survey, there are a few things that you have to be aware of. Firstly, you should decide how often you want to send out your surveys as this will usually impact how long you want to make your surveys. At StudentPulse, we see that a very optimal way is to send out a smaller survey and then do it more often. This could for instance be by asking a maximum of 10 questions once a month. In this way, the students will not get completely fatigued, and you will have real time data about your students’ satisfaction. Secondly, you should consider when you want to send out your surveys as this matters to the completion rates as well. From studies and our experience, it shows that it is better to send out surveys in the middle of the week than it is to send it out on a Monday or a Friday. Another suggestion can be to reserve time in the beginning of a class to complete the surveys. In this way, the students will be more likely to complete the surveys compared to when they are at home or when it is at the end of the day where they are about to go home. Thirdly, another way to improve the response rates is by sending out reminders to you students. Study shows that sending up to 3 reminders will increase the response rates by every reminder that you send out. At StudentPulse, we have seen several examples of universities’ response rates increasing with up to 125% when sending out just one reminder. If you choose to send out reminders, be sure to do this at the time where the students are most likely to respond as well.
Be precise
When you ask questions, make sure that you keep in mind that it should be easy for the students to understand the intention behind the questions. For that reason, you should make sure that your questions are precise. In this way, it is more likely that your students will understand the questions in the intended way, and that you will get the response that you need. When designing surveys, you should seek to put yourself in the mindset of your student in order to create an efficient student survey.
Limit the amount of questions
When you ask questions, it is understandable that you might want to ask a lot of questions to your students. However, it is important that you limit the amount of questions being asked. If the students experience too many questions in one survey, they will most likely get questionnaire fatigued which can result in them not completing the surveys or not providing comprehensive nor genuine responses. In general, we do not recommend that you include more than 10 questions per survey. This is what we recommend to anyone who uses StudentPulse as this is how we see the best results. In connection to this, it is important to mention that the amount of questions should also be based on how comprehensive the questions are. So if you include comprehensive questions where the students have to think a lot, you might consider asking less questions per survey while sending out surveys more often instead. This could for instance be by asking a few questions once a month. This will also allow you to keep track of how your students are doing on a more regular basis which will give you the opportunity to improve potential issues faster.
Topic Flow
When you ask questions in a survey, the order that you ask them in is important. In order words, make sure that there is a chronological topic flow. If you ask your students about the past, make sure that these are being asked in the beginning. On the other hand, if you ask questions about the future these should in most cases be placed at the end of the survey.
Open Question
Another suggestion for your student surveys is to end your survey with an open question. This will allow your students to add any additional comments or feedback that they might have. In that way, you will ensure that you hear everything that your students have to say, and in our experience this will also open up for issues or suggestions that you might not have thought of. All of which you can use to improve in the future.
Mental break
Another suggestion that has proven an effect in terms of motivation for completing a survey is mental breaks. This is a page in the survey where you could include a picture for instance or a text stating: “Congratulations! You made it halfway through the survey. Keep going if you don’t want to miss out on having an impact on your student experience”. This will acknowledge the effort that the students are putting into it, and it would encourage them to continue and complete the survey by making use of loss framing while also preventing questionnaire fatigue.
External Sender
There can be a huge benefit in using an external survey provider to do your surveys for you. However, you should be aware that when you send out a survey, it is important that the sender of the survey is your university. When the sender of a student survey is not the name of your university it makes it very impersonal which can also imply that you as a university refrain from taking responsibility for student satisfaction, when in fact it is the opposite. In addition to this, there is also a risk that the surveys will end up in the spam filter or that the students will not open the surveys if it is not a recognised sender.
Don’t ask if…
…you will not be able to improve.
When collecting student feedback, it can be tempting to ask the student about a lot of different things. However, one thing that is important to be aware of is to only ask questions about topics that you will be able to improve on. The reason for this is that if you ask your students for feedback without taking action to improve based on it, the students will most likely experience that they are not appreciated. This will also result in fewer responses to your surveys, which means less feedback, less possibilities for improvements and fewer satisfied students. On the other hand, if you ask your student about topics that you have the opportunity and resources to improve on, this will allow you to act upon the feedback that you get. When you act on your students’ feedback, their student satisfaction will most likely increase and so will the feedback that you get which allows a continuous improvement and a high standard for your university.
To conclude, there are several aspects to take into consideration in terms of student surveys. At StudentPulse, we can customise micro surveys for you exactly how you want it and we can assist you with suggestions as well. We have seen from several of our customers that a combination of both is usually very effective. If you are interested in a free test survey link to see how a student survey could look like for you, feel free to contact us.
