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Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

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ASKING QUESTIONS THAT MEASURE KNOWLEDGE 201<br />

14. Many people think that students are not learning enough in school.<br />

<strong>The</strong>y want to shorten most school vacations and make students spend<br />

more of the year in school. Other people think that lengthening the school<br />

year and shortening vacations is a bad idea because students use their<br />

vacations to learn important things outside of school.<br />

What is your opinion?<br />

Write a letter to your school board either in favor of or against lengthening<br />

the school year. Give specific reasons to support your opinion that will<br />

convince the school board to agree with you.<br />

Source: U.S. Department of Education, 1972–2003.<br />

survey research interviewers than others. Since survey interviewing<br />

is a complex task, it is reasonable to expect that success would be<br />

related to such factors as general ability, reading ability, personal<br />

skills, or patience. In attempting to assess the relationship between<br />

survey interviewing success and ability, we could simply have asked<br />

the interviewers to state their IQs. However, some interviewers<br />

might not wish to do so or might not know. <strong>The</strong>refore, we measured<br />

ability indirectly by asking about grades received in school or<br />

the academic subjects they most preferred. In addition to these indirect<br />

measures, we used a short intelligence test, adapted from the<br />

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Similarities Test (see<br />

the following made-up example).<br />

Different people see different kinds of similarities between<br />

things. In what way do you think that these pairs of things<br />

are alike?<br />

Saw — Hammer<br />

Lion — Tiger<br />

Hour — Week<br />

Circle — Triangle<br />

<strong>The</strong> full complement of actual items and the answer scoring can<br />

be found by consulting the WAIS Similarities Test. This scale correlated<br />

highly with the other measures used and increased the reliability<br />

of the overall measure. Note that the introduction to the

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