In UK higher education, listening to student voice can be so deeply baked into the culture that the processes and practices involved don’t get held up closely enough to the light.
Student feedback can take many forms, but the humble survey remains the most methodologically robust approach to capturing the breadth of diverse student insight. Surveys remain a critical tool for understanding students, but to some extent, the survey has become the victim of its own success. The relative ease of assembling and distributing a survey makes the bar to entry for “listening to students” very low indeed.
The consequence can often be that the student experience of being asked for feedback feels anything but simple – with multiple overlapping and repetitive requests for insight from different parts of the institution, and little sight of the purpose of each exercise, never mind what happens as a result.
Many individuals and teams working within institutions have sought to get a grip on some aspect of student surveys, make a change in process or introduce some new element, such as a mechanism to close the feedback loop. With effort and attention, those measures can be successful, at least for a while. But the same problems seem to keep recurring – low response rates to surveys, controversy among staff about how the data should be interpreted and what legitimacy it has, and the sense from students that their institution is simply much better at asking them questions than listening to the answer.
So this year, Wonkhe and evasys have been working with a reference group of 20 institutional leaders and survey practitioners to develop a framework for student survey feedback, exploring the purpose of student survey feedback and who needs to be engaged in it, and working through some of the recurring problems with feedback that never seem to be fixed for good.
The result is Survey feedback for student success – a new framework for building effective student survey feedback systems, built and tested with the sector, and featuring a reflective tool to help you think about your own practice, supported by 11 “vignettes” of real-world practice examples.
Alignment of systems and value
Neither institutions nor students have the time or money to be putting their energies into doing things that don’t create value. So what is the value that institutions seek from surveying their students? The obvious answer is student success – a teaching and learning environment that supports their academic gain, a sense of belonging and inclusion that builds confidence and motivation, and the realistic prospect of a rich and varied life following graduation. Institutions all have aspirations – many baked into performance metrics – for their students, and the goal of surveying those students must at some level be to help institutions achieve those outcomes.
But it’s not the surveying in itself that helps to achieve those goals, it’s everything around the survey – the students who are prepared to comment on what helps them achieve; the educators and professional staff who engage thoughtfully with student feedback data to enhance modules, programmes and services; the leaders who oversee and guide student feedback practice; and the underpinning system that collates the data, and presents it to the people who need to see it in a way they can digest.
In other words, student survey feedback is a system, whose inputs need to be designed so that they generate the most useful outputs and outcomes. Whether it’s pre-arrival questionnaires, module feedback, pulse surveys or cohort surveys, all should have their role to play in building a picture of students’ views, lives, experiences, and feelings that can guide key people throughout the institution to do something about it.
Take, as an example, the National Student Survey (NSS). Pretty much every institution – especially in the era of TEF – will have performance goals relating to NSS (though many will also, fairly, critique the limitations of NSS as an instrument). To the extent that NSS measures something an institution believes is important for student experience – adequacy of learning resources, for example – it’s useful to understand students’ views of that thing well in advance of the actual NSS itself, treating internal surveys at different points in the student journey as lead indicators where there is the possibility of addressing concerns before they manifest in public performance data.
In some areas, that proposition becomes a lot more complex – and thinking through exactly what kind of student insight is actually helpful to address issues and inform enhancement is vital. The NSS might ask how often staff made the subject engaging, or whether the balance of directed and independent study is right, but what that means in different institutions, disciplines and for different students is going to be varied. Survey questions through mechanisms like module feedback need to be nuanced to the context so they are meaningful for students and staff.
Making the system work
The survey feedback framework posits a system maturity model that first, establishes a rationale and process for surveying students; second, seeks to achieve as close as possible alignment between survey practice and student success using data and pedagogical evidence; and third, seeks to continually enhance itself.
To achieve this you need three pillars: engaged staff who understand the purpose of the system and are ready to execute their role within it; students who trust and are confident in the system so they are motivated to engage in it; and a governance layer that “owns” and coordinates the system. And critically, a system that visibly connects student feedback to action so that students can see their voices have been heard and staff can evidence the difference it has made.
Our discussion with our reference group of institutional leaders and experts showed how problems with student surveys can become a negative spiral – low response rates means staff lose confidence in the system, which means they are less likely to act on it, which drives response rates even lower. Attention to the user experience of staff – for example, whether staff trust survey data and consider it to be fair, and whether they are receiving the right data at the right time to action it – is as important as the user experience of students. Governance of student surveys, which can be tricky to execute in some institutions, is nevertheless essential to pursue – even if not necessarily ever to really fully achieve – system coherence.
We can’t tell anyone what their student survey system should look like. We think we’ve identified some features of a functioning system – the reflective tool in the framework can help spark conversations about what that means for your institution. But whatever the design, the system only works if it has the right infrastructure behind it. For many in the reference group, moving to a dedicated survey platform was what made the difference; removing the administrative friction that had prevented their system from functioning as intended, automating data flows, enabling demographic and course-level analysis, and freeing staff to focus on the pedagogical conversations that actually drive enhancement.
We’re grateful for the input of the institutions who agreed to share their thinking and practice with us. Those featured in the framework are at different points on their journey towards a student survey feedback system that performs as intended. What they share is a recognition that student feedback is too important to leave to improvised tools and manual processes. Getting the system right – governed, coherent and trusted – is the foundation for everything else.
This article is produced as part of a partnership with evasys. You can view and download Survey feedback for student success here. The authors would like to credit Livia Scott for her substantial input into the student feedback framework project.
