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

• 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	SD	D	N	A	SA	NA	Don't Know
	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 ...	SD	D	N	A	SA	NA	Don't Know
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 ...
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
SD = Strongly Disagree; D = Disagree; N = Neutral; A = Agree; SA = Strongly Agree; NA = Not Applicable

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

• Learn the techniques and methods used to gain new knowledge in your subject.
• Develop appropriate study skills, strategies, and habits.
• Develop awareness of learning processes and control over those processes (metacognition).
• Develop a knowledge of and appreciation for your subject.
• Develops and refines instruction based on student feedback.

Suggestions for Use
Attitudinal surveys can be used at the beginning of a course to identify the ways students perceive they learn best or to determine their attitudes toward the course or discipline. This information can be used to adapt instructional strategies. Another use is a comparison between attitudes at the beginning of the semester (pretest) and again at the end of the semester (posttest). This allows the instructor to discover the impact of their course on student perceptions on the variety of topics mentioned above. They also can be used at any point during the semester to make corrections to existing curricula or methods in a course.

The surveys can be taken in any location and require little time. A very long survey with eighty or so items usually requires no more than 20 minutes. Gender, ethnicity, major, year in school, and previous coursework can all be included in a survey.

Another feature that makes data collection and analysis easier is to use an optical scanning form and scanner (e.g. Scantron). This allows these data to be directly imported into a spreadsheet or statistical application for analysis.

Step-by-Step Instructions

• Locate an Attitudinal Survey that matches your areas of concern. Many surveys will have items where specific aspects of your course can be added. Beware of changing the core features of an attitudinal survey since you will likely lose the validity and reliability built into the survey.
• Make needed and appropriate modifications to the survey. Have someone else read any modifications to ensure that they are clear, unambiguous, and do not contain compound statements.
• If you are having students circle a response then little else is needed. If you are using scanning forms, you will also need an ample supply of number two pencils as well as the scanning forms.
• Be sure that the instructions are read to the students as well as being printed on the survey form. The scales that are used should be repeated on each page or separate section of the survey.
• Give the students as much time as they need. The time required to complete surveys is quite short. Even the longest survey (80 items or so) rarely takes more than 20 minutes.

• StatView by SAS Institute. This is my personal favorite. Comprehensive, easy to use software that does descriptive statistics, ANOVA, Covariance, as well as very sophisticated analyses. www.statview.com Contact: SAS Institute, Inc, SAS Campus Dr., Cary, NC 27513; (919) 677-8000.
• Data Desk by Data Description is particularly useful for exploratory data analysis in that it allows an intuitive examination of data without special training in statistics. The interface is not particularly intuitive. www.datadesk.com. Contact: Data Description, Ithaca, NY; (800) 573-5121.
• SYSTAT by SPSS is a large and somewhat complex application. It does allow navigation through detailed results and, like most statistical software, offers a statistical library and reliable algorithms. www.spss.com Contact: SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL; (800) 543-2185.
• SPSS by SPSS allows data analysis of huge data bases. It is fairly complex to use but does focus on output, on understanding what statistics mean, and how various statistics relate to one another. . www.spss.com Contact: SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL; (800) 543-2185.

Pros and Cons

• Students are accustomed to taking surveys and using multiple choice responses so the experience is a familiar and comfortable one. Even very quiet and reticent students are usually comfortable expressing their ideas in this format and are generally pleased that the instructor is interested.
• Instructors can quickly gain information about students' learning styles, attitudes toward a course or field, and self-assessment of skills and knowledge they bring to a course. This often results in making instruction more focused and effective.
• Survey findings can be expressed in easily understood percentages or means.
• If an attitudinal survey is done early in a course, students may become involved in the how a course it taught. This generally improves class morale, encourages students to be more actively involved in the class, and enhances communication.
• Sharing survey results with a class helps the students see the diversity of opinions and styles within their class and makes them more accepting of a variety of valid approaches to the same content.
• Often when students see a variety of approaches to learning, they are encouraged to experiment with those different approaches.
• The act of completing the survey can promote reflection and increase students' self-awareness of their learning styles and attitudes.

• Instructors may have an unpleasant surprise in discovering that their students' views are quite different, perhaps in direct opposition, to their own views or those of experts in the field.
• Some students may fear that their responses will not be anonymous and therefore be less candid than they might wish to be.
• The discovery of how students really feel about a given course can be depressing to instructors.
• The preferences and needs expressed by students may not fit well with the instructor's plans for a course. In this case, the instructor must either ignore students' expressed preferences or change components of the course.
• Surveys usually provide a broader range, but less detailed data than can be obtained from qualitative data such as individual interviews or focus groups.

Theory and Research
Research has found that effective teachers share several characteristics (Angleo & Cross, 1993; Davis, 1993; Reynolds, 1992; Murray, 1991; Shulman, 1990). Two of these characteristics are particularly relevant:

• Effective teachers use frequent assessment and feedback to regularly evaluate what they do in the classroom and whether their students are really learning.
• Effective teachers try to anticipate the concepts that will be difficult for their students and to develop teaching strategies that present these concepts in ways that make them more accessible to students. This requires becoming familiar with students' preparation, knowledge, and abilities as well as adjusting teaching strategies to maximize the class's learning.

Additional information on how to design, administer, and interpret your own surveys can be found in Theall & Franklin (1990), Davis (1993), and Braskamp and Ory (1994).

Links

• Maryland Physics Expectation (MPEX) survey
  web URL: http://http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroups/
  ripe/perg/expects/ex.htm

• Dunn Learning Styles - The instrument assesses five different stimuli: environmental, emotional, sociological, physical, and psychological. Within each of these stimuli are a total of about 20 elements which individuals receive feedback on. A number of faculty have reported success with this instrument and the information it provides about students' learning styles.
  

Sources
Angelo, T. A., and Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Braskamp, L. and Ory, J. (1994). Assessing Faculty Work: Enhancing individual and institutional Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Centra, J. A. (1973). Effectiveness of Student Feedback in modifying college instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology 65 (3), 395-401.

Davis, B. G. (1993). Tools for teaching. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Fowler, F. J. (1993). Survey research methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Gramson, Z. and Chickering, A. (1977). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. AAHE Bulletin, 39, 5-10.

Henderson, M. E., Morris, L. L., & Firz-Gibbon, C. T. (1987). How to measure attitudes. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Murray, H. G. (1991). Effective teaching behaviors in the college classroom. In J. C. Smart (ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research, Vol. 7 (pp. 135-172). New York: Agathon.

National Research Council (1997). Science teaching reconsidered: A handbook. Washington, D. C.: National Academy Press.

Reynolds, A. (1992). What is competent beginning teaching? A review of the literature. Rev. Educ. Res. 62, 1-35.

Shulman, L. S. (1990). Aristotle had it right: On knowledge and pedagogy (Occasional paper no.4). East Lansing, MI: The Holmes Group.

Shulman, L. S. (1991). Ways of seeing, ways of knowing - ways of teaching, ways of learning about teaching. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 23, (5) 393-395.

Theall, M. and J. Franklin, Eds. (1990). Student ratings of instruction: Issues for improving practice. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 43. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Eileen Lewis
Department of Chemistry
Caņada College

Early in my teaching career, I noticed that students could memorize equations, solve problems, and even use terms fairly correctly. However, further questioning revealed that students' knowledge was pretty shallow. So even though my "lectures" encouraged conceptual understanding, my exams were more traditional. Since students are pretty efficient about learning what they need to be successful in a course, I changed the assessments of students' understanding - emphasizing making sense of phenomena, connecting ideas, and giving explanations about why in everything they observed or did. Writing these questions was much harder, but it changed the type of learning that went on in the class. Students knew they had to understand the concepts, not just be able to parrot them back and solve algorithmic problems. These new assessments also served them in future courses because they really understood and had made connections between concepts.

Elaine Seymour
Bureau of Sociological Research
University of Colorado, Boulder

Introduction
Description, Purpose, and Limits
Goals, Use, and Instructions
Analysis and Pro/Cons
Theory, Links, and Sources
Eileen Lewis and Elaine Seymour
View Entire Technique
Download Technique
Tools