You will hear a conversation between two students and their tutor about a presentation they are preparing. Now listen carefully and answer the questions. Jane and Rick, nice to see you both. How's your presentation coming along? Well, that's why we're here. We'd like to ask you for some clarification. Yes, I'm afraid we are not quite sure that we understand exactly what you'd like us to include in our report. I'm glad that you came to see me, but the deadline is only three weeks away. Are you going to have it done by then? Oh, yes. We think we've done most of the time-consuming work. We just have to pull the information from the survey together and present it in the right format. That's good to hear. Collating is the fun part. Did you follow the steps I outlined in the questionnaire survey? Yes. We found that the most difficult step was the first one defining our objectives and then, of course, writing the items to match. What topic did you choose? We decided to survey international students about their experiences and the challenges that they faced when they first came to Australia. Right. That's a very broad topic to survey. We found that out the hard way. We sure did. But we are happy with our work, aren't we, Jane? Yes, so far. Yes, so far. We handed out almost 400 surveys to international students, not all from Longholm either. We sent 150 to the Western Australian Education Department in Perth and 120 to Griffin Technical College in Melbourne. I'm pleased to hear that you didn't restrict the survey to long hauls. No. We wanted to find out the responses from a range of international students in Australia, as opposed to the experiences at one tertiary institution only. We chose a technical college as well as a university campus and a high school. That gave us access to students of different ages into different disciplines. So, how many respondents did you get? Well, in our trial of the survey, we received 44 out of the 50 surveys. That's 88%, but that was tightly controlled. We didn't expect such a high percentage of returns from the actual survey itself. We had hoped to receive about 70%. Yes, we were both a bit surprised, really. We got over 320 surveys returned. 322, to be exact. That's 80%. 322 out of 400? Yes, that is an impressive rate of response. Did you have to do a lot of follow-up work to get those? We sent out some postcard reminders to some students who hadn't returned the surveys by the deadline, and from them we received another 38 surveys back. Rick had written a very persuasive transmittal letter that accompanied the survey. In the letter, he appealed for their individual contribution so that the situation for international students might improve. Transmittal letters can be very effective. Well done! So, it sounds like you followed the correct procedure up until now. You set your objectives and wrote items to match those objectives. You gave out trial surveys, collected them, chased the late surveys. I hope you had also analysed your pre-test trial results before sending out the actual surveys. Yes. Analysing the data from the trial survey was very useful. We checked all of the responses to each item in the pre-test and found a pattern in some items that had been left unanswered. We rewrote those items that were ambiguous or open to different interpretation. The actual survey worked better because of this. Trial surveys can be invaluable. So, you sent out your transmittal letters with the survey and got a high percentage of responses. You shouldn't have any problems making general conclusions for your survey. Yes, we have collated all of our data, which took ages after we received the actual surveys back. We haven't started to make conclusions yet because we are not sure how to begin our report. You've done the majority of the work, as Jane said, the time-consuming part. It'll probably help you to know the three main criteria I'll be using to mark your presentations. The first is the quality of your questions' objectives. Make sure that you don't give me aims of the survey. I want clear objectives for each item. The second criterion is the quality of the items in your questionnaire. We are quite confident with the items. We analyse the pre-test trial quite thoroughly. Yes, you have already completed that section, obviously. The third criterion will be judging the quality of your analysis of the data and the conclusions that you draw. This is always the most interesting part of the presentation for me. Should this include percentages and tables and graphs to display the data? Absolutely. Make your conclusions as visual as possible. They should be easy to read and easy to follow. Ensure that the tables and graphs are clearly labelled with appropriate headings and only include relevant data. That's great. Thank you very much. We know what we need to do next. Yes.