METHODS AND MEASURES MATTER: Meaningful Questionnaires

Some scholarship is unlikely to make any meaningful contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) literature and reflects poorly on SoTL as an area of legitimate scholarly inquiry. The question for SoTL scholars becomes how to best align their methods and measures with their SoTL questions. The words survey and questionnaire are often used interchangeably by those without specific training or expertise in survey methods. The word questionnaire refers to one type of measure that can be used with survey methods in which the measure is self-administered by the participants. Questionnaires can be administered individually, for example, having a participant come to a designated testing room and fill out the questionnaire. Pilot testing is conducted to obtain initial information on the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. Briefly, reliability concerns the consistency of scores on the measure, whereas validity concerns the extent to which the measure is a sound indicator of what it is supposed to measure.