Best questions for teacher survey about assessment strategies

Here are some of the best questions for a teacher survey about assessment strategies, along with practical tips to help you draft them. If you need to quickly build a survey that gets actionable responses, Specific can help you generate one in seconds—from draft to deployment.

The best open-ended questions for teacher surveys about assessment strategies

Open-ended questions can uncover deep insights that closed formats often miss. They’re essential when you want to hear about teacher experiences, pain points, or ideas you never considered. That said, be mindful—open-ended items can cause higher nonresponse rates (upwards of 18%, or even over 50% in some cases) compared to closed questions, with respondents sometimes skipping questions if they seem too broad or demanding [1]. Despite this, they deliver valuable, unexpected feedback: in a recent industry study, 81% of survey issues surfaced through open-ended input not covered in rating scales, and 43% of respondents contributed at least one comment beyond simple ratings [2].

1. How do you know when your assessment strategies are effective in your classroom?

2. Can you describe a recent assessment technique that worked particularly well for your students? Why do you think it was effective?

3. What main challenges do you face when assessing student learning?

4. Which assessment methods do your students engage with most deeply, and why?

5. Describe any adjustments you’ve made to your assessment approach over the past year.

6. What support or resources would help you make your assessment strategies more impactful?

7. How do you ensure fairness and equity when assessing diverse learners?

8. Describe a situation when an assessment outcome surprised you. What did you learn?

9. If you could change one thing about your current assessment practices, what would it be?

10. How do you gather and use student feedback to refine your assessment strategies?

For more on formulating open-ended items that actually get answered, check out our step-by-step guide to creating teacher surveys.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for teacher surveys

Single-select multiple-choice questions work best when you want to quantify trends or benchmark beliefs, or simply when you’re starting the conversation. Respondents often prefer them—they’re fast, less cognitively demanding, and can be answered even if someone’s not in a reflective mood. Data supports this: surveys that began with a straightforward multiple-choice got an 89% completion rate, compared to only 83% for those starting with open-ended questions [3]. After you kick off with a simple choice, it’s much easier to dig deeper through follow-ups or open-text items.

Here are some strong examples of single-select questions for a teacher survey on assessment strategies:

Question: What is your primary goal when using assessment strategies in your classroom?

• To measure learning progress

• To guide instructional planning

• To motivate students

• To identify struggling students early

• Other

Question: Which type of assessment do you use most frequently?

• Formative (ongoing, informal checks)

• Summative (end-of-unit or standardized tests)

• Performance-based (projects, presentations)

• Peer/self-assessment

• Other

Question: How confident do you feel in your current assessment strategies?

• Very confident

• Somewhat confident

• Neutral

• Not very confident

• Not at all confident

When to follow up with “why?” Always consider adding a “why” or “can you say more?” follow-up to these questions—especially when you get an answer outside your expectations. For instance, if a teacher selects “Not very confident,” ask what’s behind that feeling. These follow-ups deepen your understanding and reveal actionable areas for support or development.

When and why to add the “Other” choice? Include “Other” if you think your options might miss emerging or less common strategies or opinions. This allows respondents to share something you haven’t anticipated. When you set up a follow-up, you can prompt for specifics—these unexpected insights often lead to breakthrough improvements.

NPS-style question: Does it fit teacher assessment surveys?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions are commonly associated with customer loyalty, but they can be extremely revealing in education too. For assessment strategies, a NPS item helps you benchmark overall sentiment about new implementations, PD programs, or even district-level assessment reforms. It’s as simple as: “How likely are you to recommend our assessment approach to other teachers?” followed by a clarifying question for either promoters or detractors. It’s fast to answer, easy to interpret, and perfect for trend tracking each semester. Generate a ready-to-run NPS teacher survey using this link.

The power of follow-up questions

Automated follow-up questions are where conversational surveys truly shine. While static forms often leave you guessing why someone gave a certain answer, a smart survey will dig in—just like a good interviewer. Specific is a leader here: its AI asks targeted, context-aware follow-ups in real time, making feedback richer, responses clearer, and conversations feel natural rather than robotic. This saves your team countless email threads, too. See how this works in practice on our automatic AI follow-up questions feature page.

• Teacher: I use formative assessments but sometimes the results are confusing.

• AI follow-up: Can you share an example when your formative assessment results were unclear? What would have made them more helpful?

How many follow-ups to ask? Generally, 2–3 well-crafted follow-up questions are enough to gather nuance without exhausting anyone’s patience. It’s smart to stop asking once you have the detail needed—Specific allows you to set these rules in advance, tailoring depth as you see fit.

This makes it a conversational survey: With dynamic follow-ups, what you’re truly running is a conversational survey—one that adapts in real time and feels like dialogue, not data entry.

Text response analysis, AI summaries, survey feedback themes: Even if you receive tons of open-text answers, you can quickly analyze every response using AI. Specific’s AI survey response analysis tool summarizes and highlights feedback themes so you don’t drown in unstructured data.

Curious how it feels? Try generating your own survey and see follow-ups in action.

How to prompt ChatGPT to generate great survey questions

Want to use ChatGPT, Specific, or another AI to build a strong teacher assessment survey? Start with a clear, focused prompt:

Open with a simple request like:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for a teacher survey about assessment strategies.

But if you want higher quality, give more detail about who you are, your goal, and what you want to achieve. For example:

I'm a school administrator designing a survey for teachers to understand which classroom assessment strategies are most effective across different grade levels. Please suggest 10 high-impact open-ended questions that will help us identify successes, challenges, and areas of improvement.

Next, organize your results:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Finally, choose categories you want to explore more deeply and prompt:

Generate 10 questions for categories "Equity in assessment" and "Student engagement".

The more you iterate and add context, the better and more actionable your AI-generated survey questions will become.

What is a conversational survey (and why use AI to build one)?

Conversational surveys are chat-based interviews, not static lists of questions. Instead of just firing off a form, the survey adapts as the teacher replies—diving into specifics, clarifying what’s unclear, and picking up on cues that a traditional format misses. This approach yields more honest, thoughtful feedback, especially in nuanced topics like classroom assessment practices.

Why use AI for teacher surveys? AI helps you launch surveys faster, asks smart follow-ups in real time, and lets you create a teacher survey that feels tailor-made. Then, when answers come in, AI boils text feedback down to action-ready themes that you or your team can act on—no manual coding or sorting necessary. If you want to see an AI survey example for teacher assessment strategies or use the best AI survey generator, Specific has you covered with industry-leading speed, flexibility, and conversational user experience.

Best of all, respondents love it—the process feels smooth, mobile-friendly, and collaborative, resulting in better insights for both survey creators and teachers themselves.

See this assessment strategies survey example now

Create your own teacher assessment strategies survey right now and start collecting the insights that matter. Specific’s conversational surveys uncover what checklists miss—delivering fast, actionable results that take your classroom assessment practices to the next level.