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

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ASKING QUESTIONS THAT EVALUATE PERFORMANCE 229<br />

structional effectiveness, and they are often not useful for all<br />

instructors and courses.<br />

Types of Student Feedback Forms<br />

<strong>The</strong> first and least generalizable type of rating form is the one made<br />

up by an individual instructor and tailored to fit a specific course.<br />

(See Figure 7.6 for an example.) Although the instructor might find<br />

this form provides useful feedback in improving his or her course,<br />

such forms are usually too idiosyncratic to use for more formal purposes<br />

of evaluation.<br />

A second, more generalizable, type of rating form is one that is<br />

designed by having a required set of questions supplemented with<br />

additional questions more tailored to individual faculty and courses.<br />

At the minimum, most schools ask two standard questions of all<br />

students in all courses. <strong>The</strong>se typically deal with the teaching effectiveness<br />

of the instructor and the quality of the course. For instance,<br />

two standard items could be measured on 5-point scales of “exceptionally<br />

low” to “exceptionally high,” with the two standard statements<br />

all students answer being “Rate the instructor’s overall<br />

teaching effectiveness” and “Rate the overall quality of this course.”<br />

(1 = low; 5 = high).<br />

In addition to a small set of standard questions, some schools<br />

allow faculty or department chairs to modify the questionnaires by<br />

selecting from a wide range of other questions that are more tailored<br />

to the topic or to the course. <strong>The</strong>se types of evaluations are sometimes<br />

called “cafeteria questionnaires” and are becoming increasingly<br />

popular since they involve selecting individual items from a<br />

large menu of items. One example of such a pool of questions is the<br />

560-item “question bank” of the Survey Research Laboratory (SRL)<br />

at the University of Illinois. This wide range of questions deals with<br />

topics such as course management (organization, assignments, grading,<br />

and workload), student outcomes (cognitive, affective, participation,<br />

and effort), instructor characteristics (communication<br />

skills, stimulation of thinking, warmth and concern for students),

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