| Popis: |
Students in a first- year- experience course provided a Likert -scale rating of how much they learned about topics presented in that course. For comparative purposes, in another question they were asked to rate on the same four-point scale the academic courses taken that semester. The introduction instructed the respondent to leave a blank for the rating of any academic course not taken. With some exceptions, the number of students providing a rating for each of the academic courses exceeded the course’s roster. The number of respondents in excess of the course census was positively related to how many had selected the lowest option: “almost nothing.” Apparently, many respondents used a “satisficing” mode to answer and did not bother to read the instructions to skip non-applicable items. We speculate that their thinking pattern was: I didn’t take the course, so I didn’t learn anything. It is recommended that if general skip instructions are to be used, they need to be made prominent by use of bolding, capitalization, underlining, etc. to focus respondents’ attention. Alternately, one may want to use a “does not apply” option for each item on the list. |
