Use an education survey to gain academic insights

Online education survey questions are a great way to get constructive, honest feedback. Giving students, parents and teaching staff the opportunity to share their opinions will help keep your institution on the road to success.

Head teachers, vice chancellors or the senior management team can work on boosting educational outcomes by assessing teachers and lecturers, gathering their feedback and sending student surveys to understand their needs. But where to begin? Below, we’ve summarised just a few ways you can use online education survey questions to take the pulse of your school or institution.

Whether you’ve been teaching via an online education platform for a while, or it’s something you’ve recently implemented, there’s lots to be learnt about online provision. With different strategies, systems and methods adopted by schools and universities from Inverness through to Penzance, and everywhere in between, you’ll no doubt be wondering how effective yours has been. Maybe there are even lessons that can be learnt from online teaching that can complement in-person teaching. A SurveyMonkey online questionnaire is an efficient way of getting to the bottom of all this.

Student success starts at home. Teaching and support staff tend to only know what goes on inside the classroom. By sending questions in a school survey to parents, you can gain an understanding of the level of involvement they have with their children and how they interact with other parents. Understanding your students’ home life and the amount of help they receive with their studies will allow you to support your students better. The findings from your school survey might also give you a few ideas on how parents can help their children achieve their academic goals.

Make sure children are in a healthy, supportive school environment by sending a school survey to students and parents. See what parents think of their children’s classroom and school setting or ask students about their attitudes toward your school. Survey early and often to make sure students stay happy and safe.

Retain high-quality, qualified staff by checking in regularly. Use education survey questions to discover if teaching, administrative and support staff feel they have the level of support they need and if they’re satisfied with their leadership.

Findings from the National Student Survey (NSS) 2019 indicate that universities and colleges could do better when it comes to assessment criteria and constructive feedback. Naturally, if you’ve implemented measures to tackle this issue or other areas of the student experience, you’re going to want to measure their success. Use education survey questions to delve into the detail on feedback, teaching quality, student support, campus facilities or other topics, so you can see the impact of your changes.

Struggling to recruit for a specific course, considering making changes to course content or maybe you’re introducing a new one? Get feedback straight from the horse’s mouth by surveying current, past or prospective students about course material, graduate outcomes and what motivates them.

Do your students prefer hands-on activities? Detailed lectures? Group work? Lots of examples? Find out if your teaching style matches the way your students learn best with an online education questionnaire. Make sure that you’re doing everything you can to ensure excellent student learning outcomes.

What goes on outside the classroom can significantly affect student success. Are your students able to complete their homework, and do they receive support with this? How much time do they spend online? Are they watching a lot of television or playing video games during the school week? Are they getting regular exercise? What you discover might lead you to deliver ad-hoc lessons on a specific topic, adapt your teaching delivery or implement other measures to support student wellbeing.

SurveyMonkey education survey templates can give you high-quality data for making targeted improvements to your school, college or university.

When it comes to education surveys, it can be tempting to cover a wide range of topics in one go. But rather than asking about parental involvement, teaching staff satisfaction and student feedback all at once, it’s best to focus on a single subject per survey. This helps you get high quality responses and lower survey dropout rates. A quick and easy survey will encourage your respondents to give honest answers all the way through to the end.

A rating scale lets you dig deeper beyond a simple “yes” or “no” question, letting you discover varying degrees of opinion. But it’s important to stay consistent. Use the same number of points on the scale for all of your rating scale questions, and keep to the same definitions of high and low from question to question. Mixing up your scales can lead to confusion, which can ultimately result in unreliable responses.

Before you send around your official survey, give it a pretest to make sure it’ll earn an A+ with people in your target audience. Ask people to give you feedback on your survey so you can troubleshoot confusing survey questions or fix any bugs. See if they think the survey is focused and cohesive enough to address the topic you’re studying.