At a Glance
Great teaching is always evolving, and regular feedback from students can help you fine-tune your approach. But traditional feedback methods can take time you don’t have. Generative AI can help lighten the lift, making it easier to draft student surveys and quickly interpret the results.
In this article, we’ll walk through how you can use AI tools to help create effective student-facing surveys and quickly analyze the results—so you can improve learning outcomes without adding too much to your workload.
Plan Ahead with a Pre-Class Survey
Want to walk into class with a better sense of where your students are coming from? Generative AI can help you create quick, focused surveys so you can tailor the session to meet them where they are.
Step-by-Step Guide:
- Design Survey: Use a generative AI tool to draft survey questions designed to gauge students’ background knowledge and interest in the day’s topics. Revise the AI-generated questions to fit your goals and teaching context. Here’s an example prompt: “Help me create a very brief 5-question pre-session survey that adheres to pedagogical and survey design best practices, with the aim of gauging my students’ prior experience and current interest regarding the specific class topics listed below. Students’ survey responses should help me tailor the upcoming class session to make it more interactive and personalized. Please suggest simple questions with one-word or one-sentence answers. These are the topics we’ll cover during this class session: [Describe the class topics here.]”
- Build and distribute survey: Build your survey in Poll Everywhere or Qualtrics. Share it with students a few days before class.
- Use AI for Analysis: Once you’ve ensured the responses don’t include high risk sensitive data, upload them to ChatGPT Enterprise. Prompt the tool to review the data and identify key patterns and themes.
- Revise your plan: Look for common interests or gaps in understanding, and adjust your session plan accordingly to make the class more relevant and engaging.
Gather Feedback with a Post-Class Survey
Looking for quick, actionable insights into how your class went? A short post-class survey—drafted and analyzed with help from generative AI—can make it easier to spot what’s working and where students are struggling.
Step-by-Step Guide:
- Design Survey: Use an AI tool to draft a survey for collecting student feedback after class. Revise the AI-generated questions to fit your goals and teaching context. Here’s an example prompt: “Help me create a very brief 5-question post-class survey that adheres to pedagogical and survey design best practices, with the aim of collecting feedback on the effectiveness of the teaching methods and content used in today’s class. Students’ survey responses should help me improve my future teaching. Please suggest simple questions with one-word or one-sentence answers. These are the topics we covered during this class session: [Describe the class topics here.]”
- Build and distribute Survey: Use Poll Everywhere or Qualtrics to build your survey. Share it with students shortly after the class session.
- Use AI for Analysis: Once you’ve confirmed that the responses don’t include high risk sensitive data, upload them to ChatGPT Enterprise. Prompt the tool to review the data and identify key patterns and themes.
- Make a plan: Use the survey results to inform your work as you plan upcoming class sessions.
What’s the Research?
Pre-class surveys align with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) considerations—specifically the consideration to Optimize relevance, value, and authenticity (CAST, n.d.-b). By tailoring class sessions based on students’ responses, you can activate their prior knowledge and boost engagement with the material (CAST, n.d.-a).
Post-class surveys, meanwhile, offer a quick way to identify which teaching strategies are resonating and where there’s room to improve. Research shows that gathering student feedback can help identify effective teaching strategies and areas for improvement (Marx, 2019). AI tools make this process even more manageable by helping you draft surveys and uncover key patterns in the responses.
Conclusion
Whether you’re planning ahead or reflecting after class, generative AI can make it easier to gather and use student feedback. These tools help streamline both the creation and analysis of surveys, saving you time while supporting a more responsive, data-informed teaching approach. It’s a small investment that can lead to meaningful improvements in how your students learn.
