I added a more detailed questionnaire to the end of the last 2 progression workshops to gather further information from students about how they understand my role and the workshop content. This was accessed and completed online through a QR code. Out of 30 students across the 2 groups, I received 17 responses.
The response breakdown can be viewed here.
Here I will highlight what I have learned from the students:
- I now have greater insight into how the progression workshop is useful to students. Here are some of their responses:
- Insight into what the workshop might be missing:
- Only 65% of students have heard of my role Transition Tutor, with only 59% being aware of what they do.
- 88% of students found the Progression booklet useful for the session and 94% found the workshop helpful overall.
- I was also made aware of ‘social desirability bias’ (Edwards, 1957) when a student asked me how to answer the questions in a way that would benefit me as the researcher. I found this a bit surprising as I had encouraged the students to answer the questions honestly, and empahsised that all responses were valued in order to benefit the course and their experience. However I understand that they may want to ingratiate themselves with me as their tutor:
‘One other challenge in developing questionnaires is what is called “social desirability bias.” People have a natural tendency to want to be accepted and liked, and this may lead people to provide inaccurate answers to questions that deal with sensitive subjects’
(Pew Research Centre, 2024)
This is what I have learned about creating and disseminating questionnaires:
- Adding the questionnaires to the end of a teaching session greatly helped with student response rate.
- Creating a QR code for students to access questionnaire immediately through their own mobile device was successful. I observed most students from the session doing this.
- I found that students may be more willing to respond to positive wording and prompts than negative ones:
There were few responses (13%) to ‘Is there anything that prevents you from speaking up in a group situation?’ rather than a much greater response rate (59%) to ‘What might make you feel more comfortable to speak up in a group situation?’. - I am now aware of ‘social desirability bias‘ and will take this on board moving forward with gathering responses to encourage students to answer truthfully. One suggestion from the Pew research Centre is that this can happen more when an ‘interviewer is present (e.g., telephone and face-to-face surveys) than when respondents complete the survey themselves (e.g., paper and web surveys)’ (Pew Research Centre, 2024). Moving forwards I will address my physical presence in survey situations.
- I could diversify the types of questions such as adding multiple choice and ranking options to create more engagement (Converse, Presser, 2011). From observation I could see that most students accessed the QR code displayed to answer the survey (through mobile device), however only 57% of students actually completed it. This makes me question if there was an engagement drop off during the answering part.