Obtaining and Interpreting Students' Attitudes -- Some Methodological Considerations and a Case Study

Obtaining students' attitudes, opinions, feedback, etc., plays an essential role in the higher educational process because it makes it more bidirectional and engaging for the students. Including larger populations in surveys often calls for informational structuring/standardization for subsequent statistical post-processing. Moreover, it brings along some well-known methodological issues (e.g., the central tendency in Likert scale-based surveys). Here we build upon a relatively large student survey case previously presented more extensively in [1]. That survey was devoted to various aspects of economics and business-related education offered on an elective basis to electrical engineering and computer science students. Here we focus on the interference between the intrinsic information (that is, the "true type" student responses) and the processing method that, if not designed carefully, can increase incentives for students to conceal their true type and recourse to the neutral ("central") answers. We also discuss our new practical approach currently tested in a similar population.