Just like every good workplace keeps tabs on their employees’ feedback, every school or educational organization should know what their students think. And while you could wait for a special occasion to ask them, there is a better alternative—proactively sending out surveys to gather feedback.
When done right, student surveys can increase student engagement, improve your organization’s assessment score, and make the teaching experience more enjoyable for everyone involved. Sit back and relax as we walk you through the ins and outs of student surveys so you can get started with yours today.
What is a student survey?
A student survey is a type of survey that you send out to your students to find out how they feel about a course, instructors, school program, curriculum, and any other aspect of your educational program.
A student survey can be done in person on your premises, during or after classes. However, creating student surveys online with online survey software such as Survicate is a much quicker and more efficient alternative. Besides a great survey platform, you need some great student survey questions, and we’ll give you plenty of examples in a minute.
A student survey form is a way to gather feedback (in the form of qualitative and quantitative data) and analyze it much more quickly than you would by merely asking questions during or after classes.
When to run student surveys and why
Just like any other survey type, student surveys are not something you can do on a set-it-and-forget-it basis. It’s a great idea to catch up with your students on different occasions several times throughout the year. Here are some good situations to run student surveys.
Use this template
Getting feedback about your online course
Perhaps your students signed up for one thing and your course and instructors were teaching them something else. A student survey can show you quickly whether the course is meeting your students’ expectations and whether you need to make any major changes. The responses can shape the future of your course and teaching style.
Improving your school offering
A student survey allows your students to show how they truly feel about what your school or course has to offer. Remember, you can turn your student satisfaction survey into an anonymous one in Survicate with one click, which is a neat way to get raw feedback.
Running internal assessments on teacher performance
Maybe you have a hunch that a certain teacher or instructor is underperforming. Or maybe you just want to take a closer look at individual teacher performance every once in a while. A student survey is a superb way to get anonymous feedback about one or all of your teachers.
Evaluating teaching methods
Your instructors or teachers may think that the methods they use are current and up-to-date. In reality, though, your students may have different thoughts. You can use a survey to compare the teaching methods of two different teachers with the same curriculum, to see which one is preferred by the students.
Use this template
Optimizing the workflow and workload
Unless you’re in your students’ shoes, you won’t be able to tell if the amount of material or the way it is delivered is overwhelming. Run a survey every once in a while to learn if you need to adjust the scope of your courses to better suit your students’ capacity.
Student survey questions
Depending on what aspect of your student-teacher-course relationship you want to examine, you’re going to ask different types of questions. For your ease of use, we sorted these survey questions for students in groups. Each student survey question can have multiple forms: it can be an open-ended question, a rating scale question, a yes/no question… It all depends on the type of feedback you want to collect.
Student engagement survey questions
Students who are engaged are students who feel excited about participating in their classes. Engagement student survey questions let you find out just how invested your students are in the course materials.
- In general, how interested are you in your classes?
- How likely are you to actively participate in classes?
- What aspects of the course do you find the most/least engaging in this school year?
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how much effort are you putting into your class activities right now?
- If you were the teacher for this class, what is the one thing you would change to make the course more engaging?
Student satisfaction survey questions
While students are here to learn, it’s also necessary for them to feel satisfied with their progress, the materials they’re learning from, and their teachers. Here are some great student survey questions to ask in your student survey form.
- Overall, how satisfied are you with this course/program?
- How likely are you to continue at this course/school/university after this year?
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this course to others?
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our school/course policies?
- How satisfied are you with the quality of teaching?
- How satisfied are you with the overall learning environment?
Bear in mind that all of these questions are a variation of the standard CSAT survey. As such, you can use our CSAT survey template and adapt it according to your needs so you can measure student satisfaction just as well.
Student course evaluation survey questions
Before evaluating the teacher, you may want to take a look at your course first. The feedback you collect here shows you whether your course is structured the right way, at the right pace, and at the right level of knowledge and understanding.
- Overall, how satisfied are you with this course?
- How likely are you to recommend this course to a friend?
- What did you like the most/least about this course?
- Did this course meet your needs and expectations?
- Were the covered topics relevant to the course?
- How helpful was this course in advancing your educational/career goals?
- How practical do you think the materials you learned are?
Pro tip: every time you want to ask a question such as “How likely are you to recommend…”, you’re using an NPS survey, one of the most common survey types out there. To make the most of it, try using an NPS survey template from our library.
Use this template
Teacher evaluation survey questions
The methods and qualifications of your teaching staff are just as important as your course materials. Especially if you have more than one teacher working on a specific course at a time, it’s useful to compare your students’ thoughts about your teachers.
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how knowledgeable is your teacher/instructor?
- How clearly did your teacher explain the course materials?
- How easy is it to approach your teacher/instructor if you have questions?
- How well did your teacher answer students’ questions?
- How receptive is your teacher to the feedback you gave them?
- How would you rate your teacher’s organizational skills this school year?
- Which areas did your teacher excel in? In which areas did they not do great?
Student bullying survey questions
If you work in a school setting (be it online or offline), you know that bullying is sadly quite common. However, the right kind of survey can help you spot student harassment in time, be it from other students or even your teachers.
- During this course, have you been bullied?
- Could you describe a situation when you were bullied?
- Where do you think most of the bullying situations happen?
- Have you missed classes this year because of bullying?
- Have you talked to your teacher or someone else about being bullied?
- How safe do you feel at school/in this institution?
- If you do get bullied, where do these situations happen the most?
Back-to-school student survey questions
As your students are just getting back to school with a fresh mind, this is the perfect time to ask them questions about their expectations for the upcoming semester or year. It’s also the perfect opportunity to lighten the mood and set the right tone by asking some more light-hearted questions to get to know your students better. Here are some survey question examples for this use case.
- What’s the most important quality for you in a teacher?
- What do you want to be doing in five years?
- What is your preferred way of learning?
- What are the five adjectives that would describe you best?
- What do you usually do for fun?
- What is your education/career goal after completing this course?
Start creating student surveys with Survicate
Now that you know the many benefits of running student surveys as well as great questions that you can use, you can create a student survey of your own. And you don’t have to be a professional marketer, developer, or researcher to create a survey. All you need is a Survicate account and some student survey questions from this list.
Getting started is a matter of signing up and browsing through our extensive library of survey templates. Student surveys are just one of the many survey types you can use as a template. Leave the questions as they are or change them to suit your student audience better. In any case, your student survey will be complete and ready to send out in less than five minutes.
Capture your students’ feedback today so you can prepare for a better tomorrow with Survicate’s freemium plan.
Mile Zivkovic
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Mile is a content marketing strategist and writer and has been in the world of SaaS since 2016. You can find him writing on topics such as productivity and marketing
