Creating a survey in Terracotta

Would you like your students to take a pre- or post-experiment survey? While it might be tempting to give students a link to a survey platform and have them take the it there, you’ll have to do some work to link the data to your experiment data in Terracotta. If you create the survey in Terracotta, your students' responses will automatically be linked (and deidentified!) to the rest of their work.

Create your survey

Before you start entering the survey into Terracotta, it will be helpful to have your questions and choice text written out beforehand. Please note that if you’d like your students to take the survey before they complete other assignments, you will need to set your assignments' open and close dates accordingly in Canvas.

1. Give your assignment a title; students will see this title in Canvas. Since all students will take the same survey, click create your first assignment or create assignment and then with only one version. Name the assignment (perhaps something like Pre-Unit Survey), then click Save & Close. Click Edit. 

2. Then, click Add question. Choose multiple choice, add the first statement or question to the Question field.

3. Add as many multiple choice options as you would like for your scale, then add the statements (i.e., strongly agree, agree, etc.) to the options.

4. Change the points to 0, since there is no right answer. If you don’t, students will see that they receive 0/x points for the survey, which could impact their grade negatively unless you set the survey not to count in the course grade.  

5. Repeat these steps for the remaining statements or questions.

6. Add any open-ended questions. Again, remember to change the points to 0 for each one. 

When you’re done, click Save and Close.  

Now that you’ve created your survey, it’s easy to create a post- survey if you’d like to track how students' knowledge of a subject, or their feelings about it, has changed over time.

1. To duplicate this survey, click the meatball menu under Actions, and click duplicate.

2. Then, change the assignment name (perhaps to something like End-of-unit Survey) by clicking the meatball menu, then Edit, then type in the new name and click Save & Close.

3. Click the meatball menu again, and Move the survey to the appropriate exposure set. Recall that exposure sets are like units of time in the course, so move it to a later, or to the final, exposure set.