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Introduction

Some teachers find student feedback essential, or at least very helpful. Not long time ago one of my teachers asked us to fill in a questionnaire. He was interested in our opinions about his Writing and Research Skills course. He greatly trusted the objectivity of this research. I was thinking how honestly should I answer the questions. I assumed that I wasn't the only one to hesitate.

Now I'm questioning the objectivity of student feedback gained this way. Thus I decided to conduct my mandatory research on this area.

Method

The base of my research is the research paper, written by my teacher of the course I'm writing this paper for (see Horváth, 1997). He asked the students in ANG 1601, 1602 and 1603 to fill in a questionnaire of eight questions, including some about attendance and preparation for the course, and questions such as "how useful has the WRS course been for you" (Horváth, 1997). He also asked about the clarity of the sessions and the improvement of the students' writing skills. The answers were to be given on a range of 1 to 7, where 7 was the highest, or most positive answer. We received the questionnaire on October 13, at the end of the session. We took it in English. Altogether 33 students (78%) turned them in. For more data consult his report (Horváth, 1997).

I made up a questionnaire myself, and asked the students personally in four areas. I asked three of the questions my teachers has asked. Those were on usefulness, clarity, and improvement. As a fourth questions I directly asked about the honesty of their answers they gave for my teacher's questionnaire. From December 1 to 9 I managed to interview 15 students, about 46 percent of the former research participants.

Table 1: Extract the results of the classroom survey ( Horváth, 1997)

Results and Discussion

Table 1 presents the numeric figures of my teacher's questionnaire. Table 2 shows the results of my own research.

Usefulness
The question was: "how useful has the WRS course been for you?". ? The mean average is 5.45. When I asked them directly the mean average changed to 3.73. That may indicate that their opinion has changed over time.

Clear
The question "how clear has the WRS course been for you" produced a mean average of 6.09. When directly asked it changed to 4.93, that again may be a result of the time lapse.

Improved-Will improve

In the previous research there were two items concerned with improvement. One on the improvement of the writing skill till October 13, the other is the expected improvement later in during the remaining of the term. Since I conducted mine at the end of the term, to question the improvement in the future would have been senseless. The mean averages were 4 (for the first question) and 6.30 for the second. My research resulted a mean average of 3.53.

Honesty
When directly asked about their amount of honesty when answered the questions of the original research, the lowest answer was 3, the highest 7 with a mean average of 4.6.

Conclusion