Job Discussion Forums

[DirtGuy]

There is another thread running here about non-white people teaching in China and I want to survey the attitudes of my students on that subject. I don't think anyone has ever asked their opinion about anything so I want to introduce this way of doing things. I did ask them, as part of their final, to tell me (anonymously) at least one thing they didn't like about the class and that took a bit of explaining.

The problem is that I have no clue how to do a survey. I don't want to give them simply yes/no, black or white, questions but I don't know what constitutes a "good" survey question. One goal of this is to force them to examine their true feelings about having a non-white teacher and that is the info I'm looking for.

Anyone done a real survey/poll and can you give me some pointers?

Thanks.

DirtGuy

[golsa]

I'm on my phone and can't write a detailed reply, but just have a look at other professionally made surveys.

One feature you'll notice is that professionally made surveys have reverse questions. An example of this would be "I think teachers of European descent are better English teachers than teachers of other races."

You also want plenty of filler items related to teachers to hide the fact that you're sampling their opinions on race.

However, one thing you have to worry about with foreign language students is internal validity of the survey. Internal validity is whether or not the survey is measuring attitudes towards teachers' race. It's possible that the survey would instead measure how well students read English.

You can use Survey Monkey to make a free online survey and give the URL to your students. Survey Monkey will allow you to export the data as an Excel file so you can do statistics tests on it.