2 Studies Raise Questions About Research Based on Student Surveys

By Peter Schmidt

Many higher-education studies may reach false or fairly meaningless conclusions by relying on students' assessment of their own academic performance, two new research papers suggest.

The papers, being presented this week at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, found that many students paint a distorted picture when asked in surveys about their own academic success—a pattern that potentially skews researchers' overall findings and