I was aware while planning my project that I would be heading down the survey route – since the resource I wanted to question students about was a poster and not linked to any specific time or place I needed a way to capture data when and where the students interacted with it. It was important for me to be able to capture data from the students themselves rather than relying just on my own judgement on the successes of the project, and in order to allow the students a safe space to express their genuine opinions I made sure to host the survey on Microsoft forms so that it could be anonymised.
Survey design goes back throughout human history, gathering public opinion and information from censuses to post war telephone surveys (Joye et all, 2016). They go further, stating that surveys are an efficient and cost effective way to gather statistically significant data from a population. In designing the survey questions, Jones et al (2013) note the importance of having a ‘clear idea of what you are looking for’ – using the data that you want to dictate your questions and avoiding seeking irrelevant information.
With this, I set about making a survey that would not take too long for students to complete as they are often quite time poor. The information I want out of the survey can be stripped down to two things – 1) are the illustrated glossaries effective ways of communicating information and terminology, and 2) do students want more of this type of content. To situate the answers to these two questions I added in a question about their existing 3d printing knowledge, and wether they were student or staff.
To avoid creating a positive bias in my answers by only asking positive questions, I made sure that each question had both ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘no opinion’ and ‘other’ options available for survey respondents to type in their own answers.
For thinking about how to move the project forward beyond just this poster and action research project I also included a question about how respondents prefer to learn (eg, talking to a technician in person, using resources like the poster on their own time, or doing their own independent research) so that I can think about where to head next.
I distributed the survey via email (with the poster as an attachment) to all the students who had made a 3D booking during the first term of this academic year, via teams to staff members to pass on to their students, and had a QR code next to the poster in the workshop for students to scan who had seen or used it in person.
I knew going into this that a poor response rate would be my biggest potential downfall – I had looked into ways of potentially bribing students to complete the quiz, however I did not get the approval to offer discounts on 3D printing in exchange for survey responding in time. As it was towards the end of term and students were working towards hand ins, degree shows and heading home for the break this also affected responding rate and as such I did not receive a great deal of responses.
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Wolf, C., Joye, D., Smith, T.W. & Fu, Y.-c., eds., 2016. The SAGE Handbook of Survey Methodology. Chapter: Survey Methodology: Challenges and Principles. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Available at: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-sage-handbook-of-survey-methodology/book242251 accessed: 19 nov 2025
Jones, T.L., Baxter, M.A.J. & Khanduja, V., 2013. A quick guide to survey research. Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 95(1), pp.5–7. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3964639/ accessed: 19 november 2025
For context, the survey questions are included below as a PDF: