The Survey: Tool to Self Development

“Tell me and I forget

Teach me and I may remember

Involve me and I learn”

These lines emphasises the importance of how and when we involve human in any certain process, it will have better impact on his learning and recall. The more the involvement, the more we learn and remember in the long run. The Activity of conducting surveys is based on this premise of learning. Conducting survey is one of the best activities for mass interaction. It leaves profound impact on the people who adminster it and the people on whom it gets adminsitered.

What are Surveys? How do they create an impact on the learning curve of any individual who wishes to learn by doing and experience? Surveys are a set of validated questions which are asked to a significant amount of people to get their opinions on a particular topic. Their feedback and reviews are stored for the purpose of analysis. These feedback and reviews are further used to conclude the result and prepare a report which will help us for the betterment of the society. Where the act of Survey creates awareness among the people; the Survey Report aims to create a sense of realisation. It also largely helps to study the areas of improvement through reflective learning.

A survey was designed and conducted at Nirmiti Academy by Siddesh and Shardul, our students of Spoken English Program from Shivajirao S Jondhale College of Engineering, Dombivili and Institute of Distance & Open Learning, University of Mumbai respectively. The survey was conducted by them on a set of students of Personality Development Program at Nirmiti Academy. Some of the Indicative questions on healthy habits adminstered were:

Do you like to do exercise in your free time?
If you have exercise time, then where would you prefer to do the exercise, indoor or outdoor?
How many glasses of water do you drink in a day?
Do you prefer to drink aerated drinks or fresh juice?
While going to a nearby location, do you prefer to go by walking or by taking a vehicle?

Even after being a part of several surveys conducted at their respective organisations, Siddesh and Shardul were sceptical initially about their ability and prospect of conducting the survey. Being in the learning process of acquiring English language skills and working on their fluency and accuracy, it was a challenging task for them to frame a set of questions an administer the same on a set of students, who were totally unfamiliar to them. This activity enabled them to not only brainstorm about the given topic before framing a set of questions to conduct the survey. But also it improved their researching ability and the skill of framing questions. After the framing of questions, the next major challenge they faced was of administering these questions on another batch of students. These students from our Personality development program were complete strangers to Siddesh and Shardul with whom they never interacted before. Hence, they had to firsty set the context and objectives of the activity and create a friendly atmosphere for these students from Personality Development batch in order to make them feel comfortable to answer their questions. This activity, thus acted as an effective tool which helped Siddesh and Shardul to improve their interactive and probing skills. They also focused on improving their communication and persuasion skills. By asking the questions in an understandable manner to the survey takers, they showed absolute empathy and professionalism in equal measure.

This improved communication and interactive skills led them to get quick and meaningful answers from the survey takers. Based upon the answers collected from the survey takers, Siddesh and Shardul were able to prepare a written report on the given topic and conclude about the same. This aided in creating an awareness among everyone about the topic taken for the survey. The report writing for the survey thus helped them largely to further analyse the answers collected from the survey and prepare a conclusion for the same. The activity of conducting the survey was an experience of gaining a bouquet of skills such as:

Analytical and reasoning Skills
Questioning and probing technique
Strike a conversation with new and unfamiliar people
Get out of their comfort zone
Design, structure and frame sentences in English language
Persuasion skills
Overcome fear of Public Speaking

Apart from the different and established strengths of using Survey tool for data gathering and research purposes, survey method was creatively adopted as an activity for the Spoken English program at Nirmiti Academy. We all know that Surveys are a convenient tool for data gathering, are costs effective, bring good statistical essence, little or zero subjectivity is ensured, gives high representativeness of a large population and above all gives precise results and measurement. However, the adaptation and inclusion of the tool and its advantages to bring in self development, attain confidence and gain better sentence construction was truly genius.

This activity helped greatly to use the right vocabulary to frame the right questions. It also helped to improve the interactive skills along with enhancing the effective tool of communication. Soft skills development was also a major area of learning with the help of this activity. Some major soft skills which were developed through this activity were team-work, time management, creativity, problem-solving, attention to detail etc. The development of these soft skills largely benefited our Spoken English students in the overall development spectrum of objectives.

Nirmiti Academy continues to use such nouveau and transformational methods of learning in all their certificate programs in Personality Development, Soft Skills, Spoken English, Corporate trainings, Individual coaching and Business Communication programs.