Reading Outcomes Framework Toolkit

Questions by outcome

This section includes sample questions which can be added to surveys to be answered by your participants. The findings will help you evaluate the impact of your activity. You may choose to use quantitative and/or qualitative methods to evaluate the impact of your work (see: methods section).

Currently the Toolkit only includes quantitative survey questions, but we hope to add qualitative tools in the future. To help you put together your own survey you can refer to the practical example that we have included here.

The section includes a large number of 'scale' questions in which the respondent is asked how much they agree or disagree with a number of statements. These questions are longer but are often more robust measures because respondents are able to select from a number of answer options rather than just say yes or no. The majority of questions are intended to be asked before people take part in an activity and again afterwards, to see if there has been a change.


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Credit: Dave Cherry

The questions might not ask directly about reading but can be used to measure whether engagement with reading has an impact on wider outcomes, such as health and wellbeing. There are some questions that ask respondents to reflect on whether the activity made a difference to them, which only need to be asked after participation.

Icons are used to show if the questions are for adults, children / young people or parents and carers. Icons also indicate where the question is from: academic research (including validated measures, where the question has been proven to measure the desired outcome); government-run surveys (large-scale surveys that are often repeated year on year with a large sample, developed by government or international bodies); or practice (surveys developed by charities, schools, libraries etc). Here is the key:

Key

Who is the Question aimed at?
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Where does it come from?
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To identify the questions we asked for recommendations from stakeholders and searched existing toolkits, government surveys and academic papers. We selected questions that focus on the outcomes we have defined, are clear and straightforward to use and transferable to evaluate a range of activities. All of the questions included are free to use.

For some of the outcomes we haven't been able to identify questions that meet our criteria. This might be because they are not free, long and detailed questions are required or survey questions are not the best approach to measure that outcome. We hope to source or create questions to fill the gaps in the future and you can refer to guidance here about developing your own questions. If you know of relevant questions that could be added let us know and we will consider them for future versions of the Toolkit. Send full details to The Reading Agency.