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As your school year or term comes to a close, you may find yourself looking for creative ways to engage your students in reflecting upon their academic journey. An end-of-year student survey is an excellent way to allow your students to provide feedback about the year, while also enabling them to share their thoughts on how you or your program can do even better next year across curriculum, resources, student support and more . Let’s dive into what it takes to create an engaging end-of-year student survey.
Preparing Questions
The key to any good survey is asking questions that are clear, concise, and relevant. If a student feels like they are being asked too many questions or that the questions don’t relate to them or their experience, they may not take the time to answer, or give you the quality of information you’d expect. When crafting your questions, make sure they are focused towards the topics you want feedback on and be aware of the length of each question. Aim for one-sentence questions and avoid lengthy explanations so that the survey moves quickly and easily.
When preparing questions for your survey, make sure they are open-ended and specific enough that they provoke thoughtful answers. Ask questions that range from their favorite memory of the school year, to their biggest struggles and what they learned from them. You can also ask questions about how you can improve as a teacher or how the classroom environment makes them feel.
Additional question topics can include
- Quality of textbooks, online resources..etc.
- Access to mentorship and support
- Exposure to real-world challenges and opportunities
- Quality of tutoring programs, and other academic support
- Opinions of project structures and team dynamics
- Feedback to help the next generation of students
Regardless of the topic, making the survey feel personalized is key. For example, if you are creating a survey about class engagement, you could ask questions like “What activities in this class have been most engaging for you?” or “What could I do differently that would help keep you more engaged?” Another great question is “How did I make learning in this class fun?”
These types of questions will give you valuable insight on how well your teaching style is connecting with students and which elements of the classroom environment need improvement. Where possible, it helps to leverage multimedia, like voice and video, to make the survey capture your energy and excitement in the survey, while letting students have the freedom to easily share open-ended thoughts.
Open Ended Questions
One way to make sure you get quality responses is by including open ended questions in your survey. This allows students to give detailed answers in their own words without feeling limited by multiple choice options, and helps you discover insights you might have missed with closed questions. Open-ended questions can provide insight into what students really think and feel about their learning experience - Just remember to keep these types of questions short, punchy, and relevant!
Following Up
If some of your students don’t complete the survey right away, follow up with gentle nudges via email or through announcements at the end of class meetings as needed. One tip is to set a deadline before your term or school year ends, so that students must complete it before they move on from the current subject. Remind them why completing this survey is important for both themselves and for making improvements in future classes!
Check out the power of voice and video in surveys with Voiceform.
Crafting an engaging student survey doesn’t have to be difficult – all it takes is some careful planning to ensure you create a survey that feels personalized to your students. When creating your survey, make sure to cover only relevant topics, and make sure the questions asked in your survey allows for students to easily share their thoughts in an open-ended and honest way. The goal is to create a survey that helps you improve your classroom for future students, and to capture sound bites that validate your teaching style, classroom culture, curriculum quality and more.
When possible, we recommend using engaging voice and video content to make the survey feel conversational, engaging and equally entertaining. Your students are constantly flooded with multimedia-based content, so this is a helpful way to improve the quality of their response, and the level of survey engagement. Interested to see how Voiceform can help you leverage the power of voice or video for your student survey? Book a demo and we’d love to show you how.
