Assignment #5-Survey creation

So this next assignment was to create a survey, get a few people to do it and then submit the finalized survey with any changes that needed to be made. Well I have taken lots of survey's in my life and I have even made a few really minor ones so I was surprised that it was difficult to know where to start creating it. My first decision was what the survey should be about. I decided to relate my survey to my final project, due in a couple weeks. There were a few different survey that I could have created, one for educators or one for parents but I decided to create one for students.

I wanted to create a survey that would help to evaluate what type of experience students had during their outdoor education class. The purpose of the course is to create a fun, engaging class that is a positive learning experience for all students. This survey would be given anomalously to all the students- after the course is completed to evaluate how the students felt about the course. I wasn't sure where to begin so I decided to look back to my logic model so I could re-read my course goals and base my questions from these goals. From here I broke the survey into three main parts: reasons the students chose the course, the students experience in the course and lastly the students written opinions and suggestions. The original survey can be found here: assignment #5: Survey- original.

I then sent my survey on to some trustworthy friends, who I knew would be honest and give my their ideas for any changes that need to be made. The first change I made was to reduce the number of choices that I gave the students to choose from 6 to 4. I took out the yeah choice and the does not apply choice to leave only 4 choices. I generally like having an odd number of choices but then one of my reviewer's said that it is better to take out the middle option as most people default to the middle. Another change was made to a question in the second part that asked if the resources were used well. Feedback was that the question was too vague, I split it into two questions: first if the handouts were helpful and second if the sporting equipment used enhanced learning.  My next change involved the question asking if the students felt they had the opportunity to be a part of the community. This question wasn't very descriptive, what I wanted to ask is if the students felt like they were able to feel as though they were able to explore places in the local communities, which would help to increase their knowledge of local ecology and biology. Since this would make a really long question, I compressed the question asking if the students had the opportunity to discover the local community. The last major changes that I made was to reword the written response questions to minimize the chance that students could respond with nothing or no suggestions. I fixed a few minor grammatical issues and changed some wording for consistency and I ended up with my final survey. This survey will be part of my final course evaluation to evaluate the effectiveness of the outdoor education program. Assignment #5- survey final version.