On reading this draft, you come up with several observations.

Observation 1. The number of questions is appropriate for capturing a teacher's overall view of the quality of the workshop.

Observation 2. The order of the questions is not optimal because the opening background questions are not central to the questionnaire's purpose. You decide to move these background questions to the end. Furthermore, the item about learning styles (item E) seems to fit best with the items about organization and communication (B and C), so you move it to follow them.

Observation 3. You see several ways you can improve the style and efficiency of this survey. First, the combination of lettered items and numbered answers is awkward. You decide that each question will be numbered, avoiding any use of letters unless you have an items-in-a-series question.

Second, you notice that the text of the questions is not easy to differentiate from the answer areas. You fix this by bolding the questions.

Third, it is unclear whether respondents are supposed to be circling text or numbers for some answers. For consistency, you make all of the questions use checkboxes. Also, because item D presents a situation where one answer appears with another answer that is not relevant otherwise, you insert additional navigational cues.

Fourth, because three of the items fit together conceptually and have the same answer stems, you realize you can block them together as an items-in-a-series question. You decide to letter the three subquestions.

Fifth, in the questions that ask the respondents to write out answers, there is no room for legible handwriting on the closely spaced lines. You decide to increase the spacing between the lines.

Observation 4. Because the district plans to use this as a paper survey, you decide to try to fit the whole survey on one page for ease of distribution. You make sure that spacing and font styles make the directions and individual items appear as distinct blocks of text.

Pilot test. To begin piloting the questionnaire after you make the changes, you ask two elementary school science teachers and one administrator from the district to comment on your revised draft. After incorporating a couple of their suggestions, you invite four elementary science teachers to individually "think out loud" as they go through the survey (you have asked them to pretend they are commenting on the most recent training they had). Two of these teachers suggest that you add a question about the unit's motivational impact on students. Finally, the district gives you access to a dozen middle school English teachers who have just finished a poetry workshop. For this last pilot with a larger group, you change "Global Warming Unit" to "Poetry Unit" and give the survey.