Student Surveys: What Do They Think?

Many individual faculty have surveyed their students about classroom voting, and they generally report positive results. How robust are these results across a wide variety of students, campuses, instructors, and courses? In this study, a total of 513 students in 26 classes were surveyed regarding the use of classroom voting in their classes. (See Appendix A for the survey form.) Fourteen instructors from ten different schools participated. The classes surveyed were primarily freshman and sophomore level courses in calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. While several questions show the variation in response that one might expect, other questions generate consistent results, showing that student opinion in these areas is uniform across many variables.