New Perspectives in Science Education

In japan, all national universities are obliged to regularly assess their activities in order to assure and enhance the quality of the institution. They must also undergo certified evaluation and accreditation periodically, conducted by organizations certified by the Minister of Education. A group of experts review every university based on the Standards for Evaluation and Accreditation through high-level professional views. Moreover, they identify “good practices” and “areas to improve” for these universities. So, creating high quality self-assessment report is very important matter for all universities in Japan. To present some advantages in the report, the university staffs have to obtain the evidences demonstrating some effects or outcomes. Our university has the “Researcher Database System” that all teachers not only can store their outcomes and but also can assess themselves. But we don’t have a system to obtain data from students our whole university.

Then we held a web questionnaire survey to obtain some educational information of the students. The number of questions is about 80. Most questions were five-alternative or two-alternative. In a few questions, answerers could write freely. During the term of holding the survey, we sent at most four e-mails to the students. The first e-mail was sent to let the students know that the questionnaire survey had started. The following three e-mails were sent to the students who had not completed to answer the questions. These e-mails were to remind them to answer the questions.

We examined the time each student had answered. We found that the number of answers increased just after the e-mails were sent. So the e-mails were related to the increase of the number of answers. Actually, our response rate became to be 36.5% finally, while general web questionnaire can obtain only 10%.

In case of our questionnaire, we know the information that specified the students who had completed to answer the questions. Concretely, we knew the student ids. So, we will be able to unite the results of our questionnaire with other information by using the student ids. For example, the grades of the students are available.

What we will show in this paper are as follows. First, we describe the outline of our questionnaire. Next we show the effects of e-mails when we held our questionnaire survey. Finally, we explain what we can do with the results of our questionnaire united with other information.