SmartSurvey for Education
Students
Schools
Universities
Many of the country’s top educators trust SmartSurvey’s advanced data collection and analysis tools to collect feedback, inform academic research, and support student work.
What can you measure using education surveys?
Teacher feedback
Surveying teachers can help shape change across the entire school landscape, by empowering those shaping minds every day a chance to voice their thoughts, feedback on teaching strategies, and enhance student engagement.
The pupil experience
Pupil surveys offer an opportunity to gather insights into aspects of the educational environment from the student's perspective, allowing educators to spot underlying issues, gauge the effectiveness of teaching strategies, and more.
Parental engagement
Educators and school administrators can fruitfully use surveys to collect invaluable feedback from the parents and guardians of our young people. They are, after all, the silent partners in children's educational journeys.
School staff input
Fostering an environment where learning and teaching thrive in harmony, where everyone feels supported and can do their best work, is better enabled when the thoughts, feelings and ideas of school staff are sought and understood.
Academic research
The collection and analysis of raw data is a common component of academic research and scholarly projects. With our online survey tool you can download your results ready for inclusion in your thesis, or export your data for further analysis.
Everything else
If you have an educational survey requirement that isn’t covered here, why not speak to our friendly team; we are confident our flexible and fully featured survey software can work for you.
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The importance of gathering feedback in education and training
From the time we first learnt the alphabet at primary school to our most recent training sessions at work, education is a fundamental and lifelong learning experience for all of us. If we are to gain maximum benefit from these experiences, it’s vital that those providing the education ensure it is as effective and satisfying as possible.
Whether you are a head of faculty in a university, a teacher in a secondary school or an owner of a workplace training company, the ability to gather feedback from students, parents and employers is vital to highlighting how you are performing and enabling you to maintain and keep improving standards going forward.
What is an education survey?
An education survey allows you to gather feedback and opinions from both the learner and educator, and then use these findings to drive continual improvement across any number of educational areas.
Why run an education survey?
It is often easy to forget that like any other organisation educational establishments are essentially businesses whose future success relies on securing ongoing investment. And they need to demonstrate to funding bodies, investors and customers how well they are performing and improving, if they are going to have a long and prosperous future.
Whether you are university needing to attract more students, or a school trying to get more funding, or a training company look to grow the data you collect and evaluate through your survey questions enables you to understand what you need to change to drive continual improvement.
However, to achieve this you will need to keep delivering exceptional levels of learning and holistically deliver an exceptional experience. Accurate data is crucial to this, as it enables your organisation to understand where its weaknesses are across a range of different areas such as:
- Course feedback
- Teacher/trainer evaluation
- Gathering feedback from teachers
- Student satisfaction
- Faculty satisfaction
- Evaluation of learning/training programmes
By collecting data through these touchpoints, it’s much easier for educational organisations to identify areas for improvement, which will help them to attract more clients, win new business or secure additional funding by continually striving to deliver an exceptional learning experience.
98% believe that a good teacher can change the course of a student’s life.
ING Foundation Survey
What are the different types of evaluation in education?
From parent-teacher and student-course evaluation to employee-training services evaluation, in the education setting there can be many different types of feedback scenarios going on at any one time, which are critical to the teaching-learning process.
Evaluation helps educational providers build programmes, assess their performance and improve upon their effectiveness, with the education survey essential to this process.
With teaching methods becoming more and more digitalised, online surveys offer the most efficient way to do this in a variety of formats, from tests and polls to quizzes and games. All this can be easily created with the SmartSurvey platform, customised to your school and subject, and distributed via email, SMS or social media to your students for completion online.
Additional benefits include a question scoring feature, which allows you to tally your scores and results. Digitisation also makes it easy to share the results with your class and maintain records of your students’ improvement.
Three ways to gain great value from online education surveys
Improve learning experiences
Surveys can assist in improving learning experiences across all educational levels.
Whether it’s pupils in a primary or secondary school, or students in a further or higher education institution, obtaining their feedback via a simple online survey can quickly reveal what you need to improve in areas such as teaching methods, materials and processes.
Boost staff morale
Similarly, to that of pupils and students, those staff directly involved in providing the learning experience also need to be supported if they are to consistently produce the highest levels of teaching quality in the classroom.
With the right survey questions those in charge including deans, head teachers and department heads can better understand factors that can affect morale amongst staff and take the necessary steps to ensure employees are engaged, and are properly supported and able to provide the best educational experience for students.
Increased stakeholder engagement
Any educational establishment, whether it’s a school or a university will have a key role to play in its community and similarly the views of that community will be essential to ensuring the learning experiences provided by those institutions are as good as they possibly can be.
Parents, are for example, as involved in a school’s success as the teachers and students. So, if there are any fresh developments that need to be voted on such as new procedures, or changes in the wider education industry that could affect teaching, then school survey questions for parents offer a quick, effective way to engage these groups and gather their support.
Different types of education surveys
From questionnaires on the quality of education to school survey questionnaires, here’s an overview of some of the most commonly used education surveys and how teachers, students and educational administrators can use them:
Teacher feedback
Teachers are at the frontline in schools, so the survey questions for teachers that you develop will be critical in giving you an insight into how they are feeling and coping. Find out what they are really thinking, what they need in order to provide the best possible education experience and any extra support or resources you need to supply. Online surveys are a quick and effective way to gather this important information.
Teacher and administrator satisfaction
Are your teachers and educational administrators happy at work? Better measure how they feel about their working environment, procedures, career development path and even their colleagues through an anonymous online survey.
Student feedback
Ensure your school and the teaching you provide is as effective as possible by collecting feedback from the students themselves. For example, do students find staff supportive? Do they feel comfortable to contribute in class? How well do their classmates behave?
Student satisfaction
Ensure your school and the teaching you provide is as effective as possible by collecting feedback from the students themselves. For example, do students find staff supportive? Do they feel comfortable to contribute in class? How well do their classmates behave?
School leavers and graduate feedback
Each year a fresh batch of students will move on from your school or university, but what was their education experience like? Did it meet their expectations and fulfil promises? By conducting a school leavers or graduation survey, you can gain essential feedback that will help you continue to improve year on year.
Training and course evaluation surveys
Whether the training or courses we attend are free or paid for, there’s a certain quality that attendees expect and instructors need to meet. Research and evaluate if your course has been a success, by collecting attendees’ feedback on your course materials, teaching aids, learning room environment and the performance of your instructor.
Teachers in England overwhelmingly agree (98%) that parents have a positive impact on their school, yet less than a fifth (19%) say their school has any formal parental engagement plan in place.
Parentkind
Four key benefits of running regular education surveys
Conducting more frequent surveys of your different educational audiences and then gathering and acting on their feedback will help you to improve educational outcomes for both educators and learners alike.
Retain high-quality, qualified teaching staff
By regularly surveying your staff to track their satisfaction levels and make sure they feel adequately supported, you’re able to identify what else you can do to help keep them happy and motivated in their jobs.
Reduce course drop out rates
By periodically conducting instructor and course surveys with your students at the end of each academic term, you’re better able to see what they think of your teaching staff and course material. This ensures you are aware of which areas you need to improve and help reduce student drop-out rates from your courses.
Maintain your institution’s growth and success
From attracting fresh funding to growing future student numbers, the ability to measure your students’ satisfaction levels will have a major role to play in your future success. Through a student satisfaction survey see what your students think about your teaching quality, student services and campus safety and make any necessary improvements you require.
Increase parent involvement
Student success is as much about the support they receive at home, as in the classroom. By sending a school questionnaire to parents, you’re better able to understand the level of involvement they have in their children’s education. This can then enable you to develop ideas that can help parents better support their children to achieve their academic goals.
83% of students say a teacher has boosted their self-esteem and confidence.
Weareteachers.com
Three top tips for creating great education surveys
Set clear and achievable survey goals
There is potentially a lot of topics and different audiences you can reach out to in an education survey. However, rather than try to tackle too many subjects and garner the opinion of too many audiences such as students, parents and teachers in a single survey, try instead to focus on one audience group and overarching objective. By following this you should be able to achieve better quality responses and lower dropout rates from your education survey.
Keep rating scale questions consistent
In contrast to simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, rating style questions such as the Likert scale, allow you to dig deeper and gather varying degrees of opinion among your respondents. However, it’s important to remain consistent. So, if you have selected a 5-response option rating ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, keep with this whenever you use a rating scale question to prevent any potential confusion among your respondents.
Test your survey first
Before you distribute your official survey, it’s prudent to test it first. Ask those receiving your test survey to provide as much feedback as possible, so you can troubleshoot any confusing questions and rectify any other issues before you distribute it for real.
