Here I report on the results from pre and post surveys for the Fall and Spring 2022 seasons. The goal of these surveys is to open a line of communication and signal to students that I, as their supervisor, care about their goals and concerns regarding fieldwork. This provides me an opportunity to gauge student prior knowledge, goals and attitudes towards field work, and it provides the students an opportunity to disclose any concerns or other information that they want me to know. This survey was sent to everyone who expressed interest in participating in any of the salamander surveys. I had a total of 16 respondents for the pre-survey. Respondents were a mix of undergraduate students, graduate students, recently graduated students from programs both within and outside the department. This project was also opened to students in the Amphibian Ecology course at Susquehanna University, and therefore a few respondents may be outside Penn State, although are members of similar natural resource management programs. Students had the option to remain anonymous.
The questions are based on a few main goals: to collect general information about the students, to ask about student prior experience, goals, and attitudes towards collecting data in the field. Some questions are shown above the graphs, while other responses were simply summarized as percentages to preserve anonymity. For those responses, specific questions that I tie back to best practices are copied as they were asked in yellow boxes.
General information:
Surveys were conducted using google forms. Students were asked to participate in the survey and provided with a link to access the google from upon expressing interest in participating in field work. Answer formats included short-answer, multiple-choice, multi-select, and a linear scale (from 1 = Strongly disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree). Inclusion criteria include people that are 18 years or older and have contacted me at some point expressing interest in volunteering for in my fieldwork. Respondents did not have to be current students at Penn State or involved in natural resource-related fields. Respondents did not have to volunteer the field to participate in pre-surveys, but people that did not volunteer at least once were excluded from post-surveys.
Copyright 2023 Maisie MacKnight