Making conventional data collection more Child-friendly: Questionnaires with young students

Abstract

Background: Despite the widespread recognition among authors and international agencies of the significance, essential nature, and rightful entitlement of children to directly voice their thoughts, research with young students is not as frequently undertaken as one might expect, particularly in the context of evaluating teachers’ performance. Interestingly, though, when researchers and evaluators have engaged young students in data collection, they have overlooked the use of questionnaires and rather favoured more qualitative and participatory data collection tools or closed-questions surveys.

Objectives: In order to fill this gap, this article intends to make a case for a wider use of mixed quantitative and qualitative questionnaires with young students as a reliable tool to monitor teachers’ performance more systematically.

Method: In particular, the article illustrates how to design and administer questionnaires to primary school students using a framework developed with contributions from four main sources: Gendall’s revisitation of Labaw’s theory of questionnaire design, the question answer process, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development stages, and lessons learnt from a questionnaire designed and administered by the author among Tanzanian primary school students.

Results: This approach not only ensures that students respond thoughtfully and reach consensus through debating, but also provides deeper insights into the specific cognitive and emotional criteria valued by students.

Conclusion: The article shows that the employment of questionnaires with young students is likely to yield valid and reliable data when three conditions are met: (1) questions are tailored to the respondents’ cognitive skills and cultural background; (2) questions cover content that is meaningful to the respondents; and (3) questionnaires are administered in settings in which respondents can freely interact with each other.

Contribution: By establishing that the validity and reliability of data from questionnaires with young students hinge on considerations of cognitive skills, cultural background, meaningful content, and interactive administration, this article sets a foundation for enhancing the effectiveness of teacher evaluation methods in educational settings.