How to gain academic insights with education surveys

Online education surveys are a smart way to get open, honest feedback that you probably wouldn’t otherwise get. Giving students, parents, and educators the opportunity to share their opinions will help keep your school on the road to success.

School boards and administrators can boost educational outcomes by assessing instructors, gathering their feedback, or by sending student surveys to understand their needs. But where to begin? Here are just some of the ways you can use education surveys and school surveys to see if your education system is running smoothly.

Student success starts at home. As a teacher or administrator, you’re only aware of what happens inside the classroom. By sending a school questionnaire to parents, you can understand the level of involvement they have with their children and how they interact with other parents. Knowing more can give you ideas for ways to let parents help their children achieve their academic goals.

Make sure children are in a healthy, supportive school environment by sending student surveys and parent surveys. See what parents think of their children’s classroom and campus situation 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 periodically to track their level of satisfaction in your school or university. School surveys help you discover if teachers feel they have the level of support they need in their work environment, and if faculty is satisfied with department leadership.

Online learning programs are becoming increasingly popular with college students, adults, and anyone wanting to learn more. Get student feedback in order to ensure your courses are achieving their learning goals. Are your lessons easy to access and understand? Is the teacher available when students need help? Send an education poll to find out.

Is your university meeting the needs of your students? With so many factors to consider—teaching quality, student services, and campus safety—our university student satisfaction survey covers all these topics and more to give you an accurate representation of where your university stands in the eyes of your students.

Keep enrollment numbers up by checking in with students at the end of every term to make sure they’re satisfied. Created by experts, our sample course and instructor surveys will give you a solid understanding of what students think of their instructors and course material. You’ll also find out what’s meeting student needs and where you can improve.

Do your students prefer hands-on activities? Detailed lectures? 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 great student learning outcomes.

What goes on outside of the classroom can have just as much an effect on student success as what goes on behind the classroom door. How much time are students spending online? Are they watching a lot of television or playing video games during the school week? Are they getting exercise on a regular basis? When you have the answers to these questions, you can enact special lessons or education programs that encourage your students’ wellbeing.

We’ve partnered with the U.S. Department of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education to create education survey templates that are sure to give you high-quality data for making targeted improvements to your school. Many of these templates contain benchmarkable questions so you can compare your results to organizations in your industry or size.

Rather than trying to cover a wide range of topics in your survey, it’s always best to focus on a single objective. Rather than asking about parental involvement, instructor satisfaction, and student feedback in one survey, use just one subject per survey. This helps you achieve quality responses and lower survey dropout rates. A quick and easy survey will encourage your respondents to give honest answers all the way until 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.