Example of BWS survey question
For the BWS-Accept survey, the instructions to students read: “Please think about how you chose your subjects for Year 11. For each of the sets of features below, please select the feature that you find most important AND least important in choosing a subject to study.” The BWS-Reject version replaced the word choosing with rejecting. |
Best-Worst ScalingThis study asked students to describe how they chose their subjects and how they value Science in this process. Twenty-one factors that impacted the decision process were identified. The Best Worst Scaling (BWS) methodology then allowed the relative importance of the factors for choice of subject to be quantified.
Why use BWS? Asking students about how they choose subjects and determining the ranking of the factors for choice allows marketing strategies to be developed that may influence subject choice behaviour with a view to increasing the appeal of Science for study in Years 11 and 12 at school. BWS is a well-established and validated technique used in a range of settings to look at decision making. This study was the first to use BWS methodology to study how students choose subjects. |
The BWS survey |
The analysis of focus group and interview (qualitative) data and literature resulted in a list of 21 factors that students consider when choosing subjects. These were expressed as attribute statements that students consider in their deliberations regarding subject choice for their senior years at school. The BWS ranking is achieved through a survey that showed sets of attribute statements multiple times and for each set asked them to choose the best and worst option from the set. The figure above shows an example of a set of attribute statements as they were presented to students in the survey. Students saw 21 sets of statements of five statements like the one shown. The design means that students saw every statement in combination with every other statement.
The focus groups had revealed that students approached the subject selection decision from two viewpoints: accepting and rejecting subjects so two surveys were created, one that posed the 21 statements as reasons why the student would choose a subject (like the one above) and another that posed them as reasons why they would reject a subject (e.g. I don't think the subject's teachers can help me get a good mark). Students completed one or the other of these surveys but not both. |
How BWS works |
BWS analysis (also called MaxDiff analysis, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best%E2%80%93worst_scaling) was used to determine a score of relative importance for each of the factors that impact student subject choice. MaxDiff assumes that when respondents are presented with a set of factors, they will evaluate all possible pairs of items within the set and choose the pair that reflects the maximum difference in importance. These pairs become the best and worst options chosen from the sets of factors presented. A score of importance for each item can be calculated by counting the frequency with which each factor was scored best or worst. These scores for all students are then averaged and a BWS Score is obtained for each factor. These factors can then be ranked from most to least important.
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