Module teaching and integrating language skills lesson 1

Questionnaires and Attitude Scales. Another common data source is teacher-administered questionnaires and attitude scales completed by students or, sometimes, parents of students. Questionnaires can be used when there is not time to individually question students or small groups of students. Also, they axe advantageous when a large number of responses are needed, such as a questionnaire mailed home for completion by a parent of every student in the school. Questionnaires may include closed-end items, in which respondents are given a limited num­ber of responses, and open-ended items, in which a question is asked and respondents must create their own response. Both can supply information about a program’s perceived effective­ness, for example, including specific responses that may be counted, and narrative comments from the open-ended questions. Writing questionnaires is a skill, and is something that should be done with thought and care. (See a full discussion of questionnaires in Chapter 10.) Atti­tude scales, as discussed in Chapter 5, determine “what an individual believes, perceives, or feels about self, others, and a variety of activities, institutions, and situations.” Scales that are typically used in action research include Likert scales, semantic differential scales, and rating scales. Data from attitude scales are numeric, and are accompanied by narrative comments.