Teachers and counselors garnered highly positive opinions from students according to a recent campus-wide student survey.
The Office of Institutional Research at SRJC has released the preliminary results of the 2010 Student Survey sponsored by Student Services. The survey is designed to gather information to better understand student needs, perceptions and issues on institutional Student Learning Outcomes.
Administered during the Fall 2010 semester, results of the survey are representative of 3200 students (10 percent) enrolled in randomly selected credit courses at Santa Rosa and Petaluma campuses and other locations like Shone Farm, the Public Safety Training Center and online courses.
The purpose of the survey was to gain access to data and information not available elsewhere to inform district planning, policies and practices, with the intention of noting trends at SRJC.
“I believe these surveys accurately reflect the opinions of the population of students who were surveyed,” said KC Greaney, director of institutional research at SRJC in an e-mail. “With a sample size that large [10 percent of course sections], we can have confidence that the results from the sample accurately reflect the population, the only caveat was the responses from online courses.”
Since the first student survey was conducted in spring 2001, the 2010 sample population was larger than any of the previous four surveys conducted. It’s too early for the 2010 survey to affect any campus-wide changes, but past survey results have influenced important decisions such as providing more bilingual information and services to students, Greaney said. Other results from past surveys have been used by Student Services to inform on possible improvements in services and to prioritize new initiatives.
The survey has undergone revisions. In 2004 and 2007 a group of faculty, academic affairs, students service administrators and institutional research personnel ratified the survey to better accommodate the changing demographic in the student body, changes in proportions of continuing students and skewed over-sampling. A new addition to the 2010 survey was student perceptions of district police.
As part of the Campus Climate section of the survey, the District Police received lower ratings in comparison to librarians, counselors and instructors. Although these results represent student perceptions at SRJC, Greaney pointed out that the survey questions do not show the reasons behind such perceptions, which must be kept in mind when objectively analyzing the survey results.
