This Survey Toolkit is designed to support a range of needs, including but not limited to: learning strategies for developing surveys to inform program evaluation, reviewing common theoretical frameworks in student success literature, and accessing scale measures for common student success constructs used in research and evaluation. Whether you are a program director wanting to learn about survey research for the first time, a grant writer in search of more information about student success theory and research, or a student success researcher looking for quick access to survey or demographic measures, this toolkit is meant for you.

Our hope is to continuously build and strengthen the Survey Toolkit to better serve our shared campus goals of research and evaluation. If you have material to contribute or suggestions on how to improve the Toolkit, please feel free to provide feedback to the survey team at the UCSC Institutional Research, Assessment, and Policy Studies (IRAPS, surveys@ucsc.edu) or request a consultation (https://iraps.ucsc.edu/surveys/consult.html).

Getting Started: What is Survey Research? | Theoretical Frameworks in Student Success | Commonly Measured Student Success Constructs | Demographic Questions

Acknowledgments

The Survey Toolkit was researched and developed by the UCSC Student Success Equity Research Center (SSERC) in collaboration with campus partners. Particular thanks go to graduate student researcher, Yuzhu Xia (2019-20), for her immense contributions, including writing, researching, compiling, and supervising this project. Thank you as well as to the SSERC team members (undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellow, and staff members) for their support in the development of this project. We also want to thank Dr. Rebecca London, the IRAPS' team (Anna Sher and Randy Uang), campus librarians (Martha Stuit and Lucia Orlando), and CITL team (Jody Greene and Sam Foster) for their reviews of early drafts and content contributions.