Best Practices When Creating Likert Scale Quiz Questions in Canvas (Classic Quizzes)
A Likert scale quiz is a type of survey question that uses a 5 or 7-point scale to measure attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. It ranges from one extreme attitude to another, with a neutral option in the middle.
Creating a Likert Scale Quiz in Canvas is fairly straight forward. But, for best analysis results, we suggest using the Multiple Choice rather than the Multiple Dropdowns question types.
Multiple Choice (Our Recommended Option)
Multiple Choice is one of the most commonly used question types for quizzes and surveys, and seems to work best when analyzing Likert Scale questions.
Survey Statistics
The Survey Statistics is a great feature to see a quick overview of how your students answered each question collectively. It also allows you to review which students answered each respective answer. The Multiple Choice question type is nice because it will display each question without requiring any additional navigation, unlike the Multiple Dropdown results.
Student Analysis Report
The biggest reason why we suggest doing Multiple Choice question types over Multiple Dropdowns is for the organization of the data in the Student Analysis report. Each question will result with a single response in each cell (see image below), whereas the Multiple Dropdown question type has multiple responses found within a single cell.
Multiple Dropdowns
You can create likert scale quiz questions using the Multiple Dropdown quiz question type, which only has a few minor differences to the results of the Multiple Choice question type when analyzing it through the Survey Statistics feature. The biggest difference appears in the CSV (Excel spreadsheet) in the Student Analysis report.
Although this is not our recommended option for Likert Scale quizzes and surveys, if you feel like this type of question type better accommodates to your quiz and analysis needs, learn how to best set up Multiple Dropdown question types .
Survey Statistics
The only difference between the results for the Multiple Dropdown and Multiple Choice question types is that the Multiple Dropdown requires you to select the variable attached to the question you would like to analyze.
Student Analysis Report
The biggest difference between the two question types are how they appear in the Student Analysis report. The Multiple Choice question type neatly divides each response into a single cell for easy analysis, while the Multiple Dropdown question type groups each variable answer into a single cell as shown in the image below.
Dividing Responses to Their Own Columns
If you have already created a Likert Scale quiz that uses Multiple Dropdowns, there is a way to be able to split the responses so that there is only one option per cell. To do so:
Select one fewer columns than the total variables in your question, starting from the column right next to where your question is.
In the example below there are 3 variables, or responses, in my question (located in column 'L'). So I highlight 2 columns: 'M' and 'N'.
Right click and select Insert
Highlight the column that contains your question
In the example below, the multiple dropdown question is found in the 'L' column.
Navigate to Data
Select Text to Columns
Try to keep the larger text on a single line, but if you need to explain more, put it in the text below.
Select Delimited, then click Next
Enable Comma, then click Next
Set the Data Format for each column
In the example below, since each of my columns simply contains text, I leave them as General.
Click Finish
(Optional but recommended) Name each column with the associated question
