Re: Doing survey on students' use of Octave

[Doan Minh Dang]

Hi Alasdair,

Thanks for your suggestions. I also put Octave as an item for grading, with some problems on how to execute Octave commands. My students will take a paper exam this Saturday and I intend to give them questionnaires on paper (to get better return rate).

Besides of the questions recommended, I'll also ask them about the usability of materials for learning Octave that they have (perhaps they don't rely much on Octave help because of English skill, however they had some tutorials and an Octave book in their mother tongue).

Cheers,

Dang

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:36 AM, Alasdair McAndrew <address@hidden> wrote:

It depends very much on what you want to find out.  But here are some possible questions.  In general aim for the use of a Likert scale (5 choices: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Disagree) and hand out the questionnaire on paper: online questionnaires, although convenient, have a very poor return rate.  Are you using Octave as part of your assessment and grading? 

• Octave was easy to learn.
• Octave was easy to use.
  
• I found Octave helped me understand the material.
• Octave provided all the functionality I needed.
  
• I will use Octave in my future study.
• Octave's online help was clear and useful.
• It was easy to produce graphics in Octave.
• The use of Octave followed the course syllabus.
  

You might want a few open-ended questions:

• What aspects of the use of Octave in this course did you enjoy the most?
• What aspects of the use of Octave in this course did you enjoy least?
• What changes should be made to make this course better?

If I can think of any other questions I'll let you know.

cheers,

Alasdair

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:21 PM, Doan Minh Dang <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi all,

I just finished teaching a course on Numerical methods with Octave.
Thank to the new GUI, my students seem to adopt Octave easily,
although many of them haven't work much with computer before.

I intend to get feedbacks from students for assessment on how well
they are taking Octave for their study. Anybody can give me
suggestions on what aspects/questions to do this survey (by
questionnaire)?

Hints to similar research are also greatly appreciated.

Thanks and regards,
Dang Doan
Can Tho University of Technology, Vietnam

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