Who Questions the Questioners? You Do! Strategies for Optimizing Questions to Get the Best Results

This session is for the curious and the question-askers! Collecting information and feedback from our students, employees, and stakeholders is often more difficult than we expect. Asking questions seems easy, but asking the right questions in the right way can actually be pretty challenging, especially if we aren't sure exactly what we need to know, who we need to ask, or how to get people to answer. Poorly designed or implemented data gathering can waste a lot of time and human capital without providing usable answers?but there's no need to get frustrated! Asking good questions is a skill that can be honed! This session is for anyone who needs to gather information from others, whether you're writing a survey, leading a focus group, teaching a class, or just chatting in the hallway. We'll cover a variety of best practices for designing and administering human data collection instruments that will be effective for collecting the information and level of detail needed to answer complex policy questions, design impactful programs, and provide basic educational services. You'll learn tips for building surveys and forms that are easy for your respondents to complete and that generate datasets that are easy for you to analyze. We'll also review common mistakes that form-creators make and how to avoid them. Bring your own questions with you to pose to the group and let's see how many we can answer!