Wednesday, October 15, 2008

motivational profile questions

I've tried to select the best questions from those proposed by the two different groups last Friday. Essentially there were 4 common questions (so I used those) and then I selected 4 more questions from each of the two groups. With a bit more shuffling I put them into two categories and created an order for asking the questions ("general" ones first, "school" ones second).

I'll be doing 4 interviews with undergrad students. If you have the time to check over these questions, please feel free to provide feedback about question wording, or question order, or other things. However, since my first interview is Friday morning, I can only incorporate feedback for changes if made by this Thursday evening no later than 10.

General
  1. What do you like to do in your free time?
  2. Tell me three goals that you have set and succeeded at.
  3. What are three things that you have failed at and why?
  4. What are you most proud of?
  5. Who would you consider a role model (dead or alive)? Why?
  6. What do you see yourself doing in five years?

School
  1. Why did you decide to go to college?
  2. What projects have you liked at school?
  3. Describe your most fun class (grades aside).
  4. Describe your least fun class (grades aside).
  5. What type of clubs or organizations do you work with?
  6. What is your dream job? How do you plan to get there?

We'll see how these questions work in practice, but hopefully they will provide greater insight into the motivational profile of some undergraduate-level students.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Matthew,

I wonder if you will get a better answer (meaning closer to motivational issues) if you asked "What do you do in your free time?" instead of " ... like to do ...?"

I wonder if you will get students' wishful thinking instead of reality. And, I don't know which would be better for the outcomes desired.

What will you do with the data?

Mathew said...

Dionne: Nice suggestion. I have a feeling however that my interviewees may say, "What free time?" (Not dissimilar to doctoral students.) But perhaps I can first pose the question as you suggest, if they are stumped then I can adapt by saying, "Well, if you had free time, . . . "

I won't be doing anything in particular with the data. This is really exploratory: based on these suggested questions via group work do we indeed get any better insights into the motivational make up of students? Of course, I'll be sharing these audio files with you all.