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How to build a (micro) survey uncovering student experience?
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There are a lot of things to take into consideration when creating a student survey. In the following, we will give you our perspective on how we recommend our customers to build up their micro-surveys and hopefully inspire you with how you can do your student surveys. This includes an explanation of KPI’s, drivers, verified questions and follow-up questions. Based on this, we will elaborate on the importance of student experience and finally sum up how we recommend that you build up a micro-survey.
StudentPulse experience KPI’s
First, in each micro-survey, we recommend our clients to ask about two things: student engagement and student confidence. At StudentPulse, we consider these KPI’s as essential in showing how the students feel. When asking students about student engagement, we ask about the likeliness of them recommending others to study at the concerned university. When asking about student confidence, we ask the students if they look forward to the upcoming month. Combined you will get a sense of current and future student satisfaction.
Drivers — what does it mean?
Besides the two KPI’s, we provide a framework with suggested questions to include in your surveys. These questions are based on different drivers. We have divided our questions into 10 different drivers that covers everything about the student experience. When we talk about a driver, we refer to a specific focus area that has an impact on student satisfaction. These could for instance be learning interaction, study-life balance or peer relationship. As mentioned, the KPI’s will help you determine whether your students are satisfied or not, whereas the drivers will help you determine what causes this level of satisfaction.
Our selection of drivers is based on experience with how both big and small issues can have an impact on the whole student experience. This is why it is important to cover all potential issues in your surveys at some point during the students’ education.
Learning Interaction
The first driver that we recommend is learning interaction. This includes everything that has to do with how the lectures are structured. This means that we will recommend asking if the lecturers are doing a great job at including the students in discussion, do the lecturers seem committed, and do they support the students regarding difficult topics. This will show you if there is room for improvement about how the students are currently learning.
Learning Setup
In connection to learning, we also recommend asking about the learning setup. Learning setup is primarily concerned with the material that the students learn about. This means that we will recommend asking if the students are interested in the topics that they learn, if they feel like they can use what they learn and if they can relate what they learn now to what they have learned previously. This will help you see if the students are satisfied with the curriculum as it currently is.
Feedback and Evaluation
We know that a great way to improve ourselves is to get feedback about what we do. This goes for students as well. For that reason, we recommend that you ask your students about the feedback they get. Is it helpful? If not, how can the feedback flow be improved?
Goal Setting
When being a student, the primary goal is to learn and thus succeed in the courses. A prerequisite for doing so is that the students know exactly what is expected of them as this allows the students to set a goal and become motivated about the courses that they are attending. So for goal setting, we recommend that you ask your students whether it is clear to them what they are expected to learn in the individual courses, if they are motivated about the courses, but also if they find it realistic to acquire the competencies that are needed to succeed in each of the courses.
Peer Relationships
A very important element when talking about student satisfaction is social integration. When students are comfortable with their peers, they tend to perform better academically but are also happier students overall. For that reason, it is important to ask your students if they feel like they belong, if they have support from fellow students and if they do activities outside of the university as well. All of these will indicate whether the students have a great relationship with each other or not.
Institutional Support
Being a student can be a challenge at times. For that reason, it is important that the students feel like they have support from the university that they attend. This means that you will need to ask them if they feel like they have sufficient support from student counselors and other relevant staff. You can also ask your students if they have faith in you, always seeking to improve their experience as a student. In this way, you will know how your relationship with your students is and if you will need to improve it.
Surroundings
As mentioned earlier, there are things that have a huge impact and things that have a smaller impact on student satisfaction. The surroundings might be an area with a smaller impact. However, we find it important to ask students about this anyway as the smaller things do have an impact on the overall student satisfaction. When asking about surroundings, this includes the environment on campus but also the IT systems and communication channels that the students use. This driver includes questions that both refer to virtual and physical surroundings as we are aware that both of these can be relevant. If all of the surroundings are working in an optimal way for the students, it will lead to higher student satisfaction.
Study-life Balance
Being a student means that you spend a lot of time studying. However, it is important that your students feel like the workload is manageable for them. For that reason, we suggest that you ask your students if they ever feel stressed about their studies, if they have time to do personal activities, but also if they spend their time doing something that is meaningful to them. In this way, you will be able to see if your students are satisfied.
Expectations & Fit
Before your students start at your university, they have all created some kind of expectations. These expectations might be based on something they have read, heard from friends or family, or the communication from the university. These expectations are what made the students come to the university on their first day and made them stay for the first couple of weeks. As you want your students to complete their education, it is important that the expectations they have when they start are aligned with what they will actually experience when they are attending your university. For that reason, you can ask your students if what they experience now is what they expected. You can also ask them if they think that their education will prepare them for their future career or if they would choose the same program if they were to choose again.
Planning
Being a student can be time-consuming. For that reason, it is important that the students are able to manage their time. For this driver, we recommend that you ask your students about the convenience of how activities are planned, if the deadlines set by programme representatives are manageable and if it is easy for the students to manage their time.
Within each of our 10 drivers, we have developed a number of questions that we refer to as verified questions. These questions are verified by StudentPulse but most importantly by students. In this way, we ensure that you ask your students about exactly what matters. The students have the opportunity to add a score to each question ranging from the score 0–10. In this way, you can separate your students into unhappy (0–6), neutral (7–8) and happy (9–10) students. Our verified questions has these three main purposes:
Easiness: The questions should be specific and simple to understand so it is as easy as possible for students to complete the surveys.
Uniqueness: It is important for us to provide questions that you are not already asking your students as we don’t want the students to feel that they are repeating themselves. This means that our verified questions can both be used as a substitute or a supplement to other student surveys.
Relevance: Finally, it is important to us that the questions provide value for you as an institution. This means that you should be able to use the data that you get from the questions to improve in the future.
Explainers: Our verified questions allow you to know even more specifically what the students are satisfied or unsatisfied with. However, it is essential to know why they are and how you can improve it. Due to this, we offer the opportunity to activate explainers for each of our verified questions. More specifically, we have added one explainer for unhappy students (0–6), one explainer for neutral students (7–8) and one explainer for happy students (9–10). These explainers are questions which are created to ask exactly what the students are unhappy about, how the university can improve even more, or what the students like about how it is right now. In this way, you will know what you can improve but also what you are doing great already.
With the concepts in place, you are now ready to start building your survey, but first: before you choose the questions to ask your students, start asking yourself two questions:
1. At which point in time will the survey be distributed?
Are students reaching exams, are they about to graduate, has an unforeseen event (like a corona lockdown) taken place recently, etc.
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 that we recommend to ask your students are influenced by what phase the students are currently in and any unexpected events that might occur. In this way, we ensure that we ask the students about what is important to them at that specific time which provides the most relevant feedback.
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?
2. At which point in time will the survey be distributed?
There is a huge difference between surveys made for management reporting, surveys made for quality assurance, and all other student experience surveys out there.
Most often, we speak with institutions that are good at defining the survey purpose (“the why”), but have not really thought about the colleagues expected to use the results (“the who”). It might seem like a small, insignificant thing, 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. The answers to most questions will be of relevance uncovering your students’ experience, but why uncover this part of the experience if no one will be using the information? Examples could be surveys including the drivers of institutional support and surroundings, but never reaching Student Services, IT or Facility. Or surveys made with the purpose of strengthening the academic environment but not including drivers such as learning interaction and learning contents.
As a rule of thumb: for every question you add to your survey, ask yourself: A. Does it support our survey purpose and B. What colleague(s) will benefit from knowing the answer to this question?
Finally! When you have asked yourself the questions above, it should now be easier for you to choose the exact questions for the survey (and exclude others). We recommend that you build a survey as follows:
Do you want to read more about how to motivate your students to complete surveys?
If you are interested in seeing one of our micro-surveys, you are more than welcome to reach out to us. We offer a completely free trial where you can test out a survey, send it to your students and see the many benefits of our data overview based on your own students’ data as well. To hear more, feel free to contact us.
