Oh how I wish I had payed attention in AP Statistics my senior year of high school. Or at least gone to class rather than NEEDING a coffee. Or maybe I shouldn’t have missed 100 days of class. Whoops. Had I gone, maybe I’d have a better idea of how to construct a thorough survey.
Gotta get that daily soy green tea latte with vanilla!
Even without a solid background in stats, I think I have a pretty good idea of what to include in a survey, but even so I’m uncomfortable with the process. So, when it came to designing a survey to further my research about the College of Arts and Sciences at SCU, I struggled a bit. I needed to construct a set of questions that would provide further information about my initial research. but I found that to be too restricting. Because my research was centered around the development of the science program, there was no way to really gain insight about this topic from current students as I took more of a historical approach.
Thus, I decided to design my survey centered around the result of the science program at Santa Clara. I wanted to gain insight as to how students studying the sciences feel about their classes, and how rigorous they feel the science program is. With these objectives in mind, I constructed my survey, and it resulted in the following questions:
- What year are you in college? [Freshman / Sophomore / Junior / Senior]
- What gender do you identify with? [Male / Female / Prefer not to say / Other]
- What is your major? [Ancient Studies / Anthropology / Art History / Biochemistry / Biology / Chemistry / Classical Studies / Communication / Computer Sciences / Economics / Engineering Physics / English / Environmental Science / Environmental Studies / Ethnic Studies / Greek Language and Literature / History / Individual Studies / Latin and Greek / Latin Language and Literature / Liberal Studies / Mathematics / Modern Languages / French / German / Italian / Spanish / Music / Neuroscience / Philosophy / Physics / Psychology / Physics / Political Science / Psychology / Public Health Science / Religious Studies / Sociology / Studio Art / Theatre and Dance / Women’s and Gender Studies]
- If you have a lab section, how many hours do you spend in lab each week? [0-1 / 1-2 / 2-3 / 3-4 / 4+]
- How many hours do you spend studying for your major’s required classes (not core) each day? [0-1 / 1-2 / 2-3 / 3-4 / 4+]
- How many hours do you spend studying for your major’s required classes (not core) each week? [0-1 / 1-2 / 2-3 / 3-4 / 4+]
- If applicable, how rigorous do you find the intro science series? (ex. Chem 11, 12, 13; Bio 21, 22, 23) [ Not Rigorous / Slightly Rigorous / Just Right / Rigorous / Extremely Rigorous]
Even though I was mainly interested in biology majors, I decided to include all majors in the College of Arts and Sciences in order to obtain the most information I could and not narrow possible results and risk not receiving enough responses. I hope to find a trend with the biology majors, and the time and rigor of classes they report.
-FH