Attitudinal Survey

 

Purpose
 Attitudinal surveys can provide valuable information on students' perceptions of the course, the discipline, the materials and tools used, and their individual progress. This strategy is highly useful for teasing apart which elements of the pedagogy and/or technology students' feel are most easily mastered, most comfortable, and/or most personally rewarding (as well as which elements are perceived as most difficult, most frustrating, and/or most futile). In general, such surveys can be administered quickly and conveniently and the use of Scantron® forms can simplify the analysis process by allowing student responses to be optically scanned and directly imported into a statistical analysis program.

Description

In terms of content, attitudinal surveys can be used to solicit students' perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and/or attitudes about a vast range of different issues – from the usefulness of specific course materials to the overall classroom atmosphere, from students' self-efficacy within the discipline to their epistemological beliefs about the nature of the discipline itself. In terms of content, however, most surveys consist of a set of selected statements that students rate in terms of their agreement/disagreement, typically on a 5-point Likert scale.

General Requirements
 Students' responses should be anonymous, and this fact should be clearly communicated to those who participate. If students' believe their grade may be affected by their responses, they may give you the answers they think you want to hear instead of what they really think, feel, and believe.

Limitations
 Data collected through such surveys can be both valid and reliable (Hinton, 1993), but the development of adequate instruments is a nontrivial task. Luckily, many valid surveys have already been developed and tested to insure that (a) they measure what was intended (i.e., they are valid), and (b) they are reliable across students and across groups; such instruments can be adopted or carefully adapted to meet most instructors' needs. When adopting a measure for use in your particular context, be wary: if you change the fundamental features of the original instrument, you may compromise its validity and/or reliability and end up with data with little meaning.

Also, keep in mind that the data generated through such surveys is self-report rather than direct observation. Attitudinal surveys can provide a summative overview of how and/or what students do, think, or feel about a given course, but a more detailed understanding of students' attitudes requires the use of supplementary research methods such as individual or group interviews.

Variations
 Pretest/Posttest Comparison. Attitudinal surveys are often administered in a pretest/posttest design. Comparison between attitudes before and after instruction or a particular innovation can reveal the impact of particular course features on student perceptions.

Epistemological Survey. Depending on the items included, such surveys can provide useful information on students' beliefs about the nature of the discipline at hand. Students often enter courses such as science or psychology with somewhat naive preconceptions about what, for example, scientists actually do and how "facts get made." These beliefs shape the trajectory of students' understanding of the course content; insight into the epistemological beliefs students bring to (and bring away from) the course can reveal the extent to which the instructional intervention fosters (or fails to foster) more realistic views.

Correlating Attitudes with Demographic Data. Many researchers who use attitudinal surveys often collect additional demographic data such as gender, ethnicity, or age so that the relationship between student perceptions and other student characteristics can be examined. Understanding how students with different experiences and backgrounds perceive a piece of instruction or technology can play a critical role in later implementations of the course.

Example Research Studies

Additional Resources