Advanced Search

The Advanced Search lets you more precisely define which instruments you wish to view. Only instruments that match all of the criteria you specify will be displayed.

For example, if you enter "Chemistry" (without the quotes) in the Course field and "University of Wisconsin" in the Institution field, then you may see instruments from the Chemistry departments of University of Wisconsin—Madison, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, etc.

See also: Search

Course password

Each instrument can have an optional course password to prevent unauthorized people from responding to the instrument. This is most useful for anonymous instruments, rather than authenticated instruments.

Course size

Each instrument can have an optional course size that represents the expected number of student responses. This number is used in statistical analyses of the student responses. If this field is left blank, or is less than the actual number of student responses, it becomes:

1. The number of entries in the student list, in the case of authenticated instruments
2. The actual number of student responses, otherwise

This field can be edited at any time, even after the instrument is completed.

Description

The instrument description text is visible to other instructors when using the Search page. The students never see this text.

This field can be edited at any time, even after the instrument is completed.

Cross-tabulation/Disaggregation

This is the practice of comparing the results of one question against another question. The two questions can be from the same administration of an instrument, or from any two instruments (differentiated perhaps longitudinally, geographically or sectionally).

In some cases, we do not show all of the responses where that would pierce the veil of privacy due to small numbers of responses.

Guests

Visitors may sign into the site via the 'Try it out' link to experiment with the capabilities of SALG before registering their own name. The Guest account is a lightly-restricted version of a regular account.

Instrument

An instrument is the SALG survey as seen by student recipients. The instrument life cycle is divided into four phases:

Editing

The instructor has not yet set an open/close date for the instrument. This instrument needs more work before it is ready to be used in a class.

Scheduled

The instrument is ready to be used in a class. The open and close dates are in the future. The instrument can still be edited.

In progress

The instrument is being administered to a class. The open date is in the past and the close date is in the future. The instrument cannot be editied.

Completed

The instrument has been administered to a class. The close date is in the past. Completed instruments are further categorized as "public", "anonymous" or "private". Public and anonymous completed instruments appear in the list of all instruments. Public instruments show the instructor's name while anonymous ones do not.

Module

A module is a collection of common-themed questions that can be merged into an existing instrument. For example, a Lab module could be questions that apply just to laboratory courses, or a Majors module could be applicable to upper-level undergraduate classes.

Modules are created similarly to normal instruments, but any of the usual questions may be deleted which is usually not permitted. To use a module, create an instrument from your personal home page and, on the Edit Questions screen, select a module to import.

Public/Private Instruments

Instruments can be public, anonymous or private:

Public

Anyone can see this instrument via the Search feature. Others may duplicate the questions of this instrument to create their own.

Anonymous

Same as Public, except the identifying Instructor Name is removed from the search results.

Private

The instrument will not appear in the search results.

Default

Unless specified otherwise, an instrument starts out as Private and changes to Public after it has been completely administered (that is, when the close date arrives). If the instructor specified Public, Anonymous or Private explicitly, then no change occurs when the close date arrives.

Question Types

Instruments are allowed to have four different types of questions:

Scale

The question has a set of options selected by the student. This type of question can be: a) nominal, or un-ordered (e.g., "Yes", "No"); b) ordinal, or ordered ("a lot", "a little", "not at all"). Instructors can use existing scales provided on the SALG site, or can create their own.

Long answer

A multi-line free response. The response is limited to about 2000 characters. Any printable characters are allowed in the response, including foreign characters.

Group

A heading question or statement. This type is rhetorical, serving only to organize sub-questions.

Search

The Search box lets you narrow the list of all instruments.

For example, if you wish to see only instruments that apply to Chemistry classes, type "chemistry" and press Return. Then, only instruments that have the word "chemistry" in one of their descriptive fields will be displayed. For more specific searching, like displaying instruments which have "chemistry" in their Course field, see the Advanced Search.

Statistics

The analysis tools of the SALG site report the following statistical results:

Mean

The mean is the average choice value among the responses. The calculation only applies to ordinal choices, not nominal choices.

Mode

The mode is the most popular choice value among the responses, excluding "not applicable" values.

N

N is the number of responses, excluding any "not applicable" values.

Standard Deviation

If the results are ordinal, we report the sample standard deviation which is measure of the spread of the result values. The standard formulation differs from the pure standard deviation in that it uses N-1 instead of N to normalize. The SALG software employs a formula that is equivalent to the following:

We omit any "not applicable" results from the calculation. See also:Wikipedia's Standard Deviation entry

Student identity

An instructor has three choices for student identification. For each choice, students always enter their email address. However, the choices differ in access to those email addresses.

Authenticated

The instructor will provide a list of student email addresses and only those students can participate. The instructor can tell which students have responded to the instrument, but will not be able to tell which responses are tied to which student email address

Non-anonymous

Access to the instrument is not controlled by an email list, but the instructor can see which email addresses have responded, just like in the Authenticated case.

Anonymous

The instructor never sees any student email addresses and can only tell how many students responded, not which ones.