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Questionnaires and Experiments

It is important to be able to design simple questionnaires for the GCSE examination

Key properties

· Keep questions simple and to the point

· Avoid leading questions such as “do you agree…”

· Avoid emotive language which might sway peoples’ opinions

· Always provide clear response boxes so that the information the recipient gives is useful

Examples of good questions

1) Rate your teacher from 1 to 5 by ticking the relevant box below, the higher the number the better

1

2

3

4

5

2) How many days do you watch TV a week

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Poor questions

Poor Question	Reason
Do you like your teacher?	It is not obvious which teacher the question is referring to
How good is school?	There are no tick/response boxes
Do you agree that killing innocent animals is wrong?	This question is both leading and emotive (due to word innocent)

DATA Handling Cycle

· Collect data to investigate an hypothesis

· Work out an appropriate average to see whether the hypothesis is true

· Compare the averages and make a conclusion

Example – Jack thinks boys are better than girls at maths however he thinks girls are more consistent

· He could collect test scores from Mathematics

· He could work out the mean score for both boys and girls in Maths. He could also work out the range

· If the boys mean is bigger than he will deduce that boys are better. He would expect the girls to have a smaller range if they are more consistent