Page 116 - Making Instruction Work

chap 9 3/4/97 3:35 PM Page 102

102 making instruction work

the course was run and the way it should have been con-
ducted to maximize your learning reveal things the course
developers should have taken into consideration before
developing their course.

Goofing Off with Questionnaires

Questionnaires are not a useful source of information about
your students. Why izzat, you may wonder? It’s because it takes
a great deal of skill and time to prepare a questionnaire that
will elicit the type of information you may want. Items have to
be drafted, and they absolutely must be tested and then
revised, and maybe tested again, before one can have any
assurance at all that the questionnaire tells you what you want
to know. And people with this specialized skill are rare. If they
are skilled in questionnaire development, they are not likely to
be working in a training department.
If you just slap a questionnaire together, you aren’t going to
find out what you want to know, because it’s hard to write
items that aren’t ambiguous. And when faced with ambiguous
questions—or questions they think may be dangerous to their
job—people will simply tell you what they think you want to
hear. What you will do is create a great deal of paperwork for
somebody—reproducing multiple copies, locating mailing
addresses, affixing postage, and so on.You will also create work
for someone who has to tabulate and/or analyze the “results.”
But those results will be mostly “garbage in—garbage out.”
So unless you are looking for a way to expand your empire,
consider the questionnaire as an impractical method for find-
ing out about a target population. And don’t use a question-
naire just because someone is bedazzled by data gleaned from
large samples. It is far more productive, as well as faster and
cheaper, to talk to a few people directly, either by phone,
e-mail, or in person.