Attitudinal Survey

Eileen L. Lewis
Department of Chemistry
University of California, Berkeley

Elaine Seymour
Bureau of Sociological Research
University of Colorado, Boulder

Why use an Attitudinal Survey?
This type of survey provides valuable information on student perceptions of their classroom experience.  This includes general attitudes toward the course, the discipline, and their own learning.  The results from this survey can also help you identify elements in your course which best support student learning.

What is an Attitudinal Survey?
While attitudinal surveys may take many forms and address a range of issues, they typically consist of a series of statements that students are asked to express their agreement or disagreement (using a scale.)

What is Involved?
Instructor Preparation Time:	Very little time is needed to use a valid, existing survey.  Large amounts of time are required to develop a survey that is reliable and measures what is intended.	
Preparing Your Students:	No training is required, but a description of the survey’s goals and scales should be read to students as well as included in the survey form itself.	
Class Time:	Varies with length, but rarely more than 20 minutes.	
Disciplines:	Appropriate for all.	
Class Size:	Appropriate for all.	
Special Classroom/Technical Requirements:	None, although an optical scanning device may be useful to read and analyze data in large classes.	
Individual or Group Involvement	Typically individual. 	
Analyzing Results:	Depends very much on class size and length of the survey.  In large classes, the use of scanning forms and optical readers makes the task easier. 	
Other Things to Consider:	To insure meaningful results, student responses must be guaranteed anonymity. 
These surveys can be given pre and post to measure gains over a course or to provide mid-course corrections to classroom teaching methods.
Demographic data may be included in the survey so that correlation with gender, major, or ethnicity can be made.	

Contents
•	Description
•	Assessment Purposes
•	Limitations
•	Teaching Goals
•	Suggestions for Use
•	Step-by-Step Instructions
•	Analysis
•	Pros and Cons
•	Theory and Research
•	Links
•	Sources
•	Eileen Lewis and Elaine Seymour

Description
An attitudinal survey (also known as an affective survey) can provide information on student perceptions (emotions, feeling, attitudes) of their classroom experience.  For example it can reveal perceptions on:
•	the content of a course
•	specific components of a course 
•	course components which aid or are detrimental to learning
•	the effects of course innovations

Attitudinal surveys may also focus on students’ needs in taking a course, how well those needs are met, student interest in or appreciation for the subject matter or field, student confidence in their ability to perform in a course, or their beliefs about the nature of the discipline itself, e.g.
•	the nature of a discipline (chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering)
•	the nature of learning within a discipline
•	their ability to learn within a course
•	useful strategies for learning within a course or discipline
•	their own learning style or preferences for learning

Figure 1: Sample statements from an attitudinal survey on students’ learning: 
	Please use the 7-point scale to indicate your agreement or disagreement with each statement.  
Record all responses on your Scantron form.
organization		
	lab									
 8	Often in lab I didn’t understand the concept behind the lab experiment.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
 9	I like labs where I get to help design an experiment to answer a question.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
10	This course provided opportunities for me to help design experiments to answer a question.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
11	It was clear how the lab experiments fit into this course.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
12	Doing labs in this class was like following a recipe in a cookbook.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
13	The lab manual for this course was well-written (easy to understand).	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
	
Assuming that all the following activities are equally well-implemented, I learn well by ...		
33	doing homework assignments.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
34	using diagrams and other visual media.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
35	using computer-based materials.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
36	reading a (good) textbook.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
37	working with my lab partner.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
38	getting good help / tutorial aid.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
39	doing hands-on activities.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
40	listening to lecture.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
45	completing lab notebooks or lab reports.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
46	reading and re-reading materials.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
	I know I understand when ...	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
49	I can work problems in the book.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
50	I can apply ideas to new situations.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
51	I get a good grade on an exam.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
52	I can explain the ideas to someone else.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	
53	I can see how concepts relate to one another.	1	2	3	4	5		6	7	

Assessment Purposes
Depending upon the questions asked, instructors can be provided with information about students' learning styles or preferences for ways of learning.  This allows instructors to choose among instructional approaches that would best meet the needs of students.  Instructors can also discover which components of their course contribute most significantly to students’ learning.  

General information on students' beliefs about the nature of science/ mathematics/ engineering is helpful in designing activities to foster a more realistic view of a discipline and what members of that discipline do.  For example, students would be asked to express their agreement with the statement, “Science, as it is practiced in the real world, is objective and unbiased.”  

An added benefit of this type of survey is that students are prompted to reflect on their own learning preferences, strengths, or styles.  This often helps students become better managers of their own learning and encourages them to engage in more fruitful activities. 

Limitations
While the questions or statements on an attitudinal survey may seem obvious, they are, in fact, the result of considerable work in both designing the question/statement so that it measures what it was intended to measure (called validity) and that it has reliability across students and groups.  For these reasons, the outcomes from surveys that are written without checking their validity and reliability are often without meaning. 

Additionally, for best results, students must be guaranteed anonymity.  This means if the instructor analyzes the data, no student identification should be requested.  You may ask for demographic information like gender, ethnicity, major, etc. and look for correlation across those variables.  If you want to correlate student responses to their performance, you must have someone else gather and analyze the data, explicitly letting the students know you are doing so.  Data analysis can be very time consuming in large classes unless you have optical scanning response forms and an optical reader, e.g. Scantron® forms and optical scanner.  If these resources are present, data can be scanned and directly imported into a statistical analysis program or spreadsheet program for analysis.  For small classes, you may provide additional space for students to elaborate on their ideas. 

Teaching Goals
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