Workshop Evaluation Form Template
A workshop evaluation form is a form that helps you gauge how complete and satisfying the learning process was during your workshop. Ask the participants to fill out a form like that and review your workshop. Here is a form template for you to use.
AidaForm’s sample workshop evaluation form is a starting point, a generic workshop evaluation template: use it as an inspiration to decide what you want to find out through your workshop evaluation form. Modify it as you wish, give the link to the workshop participants, collect feedback!
Now You Have a Sample of a Workshop Evaluation Form — Use It Effectively
Workshop evaluation is essential to understanding how effective your session was. Did it meet the participants’ expectations? Were there any technical issues? Were the contents relevant and easy to understand? Asking people to review your workshop will help you attract additional attention to your offering, identify and correct mistakes, improve workshop structure to cover more useful material for students.
You can hold workshops on anything from team building to growth hacking — don’t forget to gather feedback. Here are a few simple tips on how to create a workshop evaluation form that collects meaningful feedback and is easy for the participants to follow.
Start your workshop evaluation questionnaire with an introduction
Remind the participants of the workshop details before asking questions. You can add the following information about the workshop using the Text field:
- Theme
- Date
- Venue
- Name of the trainer
Tip: If there were several trainers, we recommend to specify the workshop parts that each trainer was involved in.
Fill your workshop evaluation questionnaire with the most relevant questions
Think about what you need to know before you compose the workshop evaluation questions themselves. Getting relevant information will help you improve the quality of your workshops for future participants and help you get more happy attendees later. However, you should keep the workshop evaluation form short and make sure your questions are clear and direct. Here are some dos and don’ts for questions you add to the AidaForm workshop evaluation example:
Avoid compound questions
Those are complex wordy questions that have several potential answers. Here’s an example of a compound question:
Would you prefer the workshop to be held on Wednesday and Thursday for two hours or on Saturday for four hours, or are you fine with both?
With this wording, it is difficult for the respondent to answer clearly. They would often perceive just a part of a question like that and the answer might be incomplete and unreliable. Plus, it’s difficult to read.
Tip: Deconstruct the compound question into separate ones or paraphrase the question using simpler wording and several answer choices. Like this:
How would you like the workshop to be scheduled in the future?
- 2 two-hour sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays
- 1 four-hour session on Saturdays
- Both options are fine
- I would prefer different dates (please specify)
Don’t ask leading questions
These workshop evaluation form questions guide the respondent towards a particular desired response. That means the answer is very likely to be biased. As a result, your workshop evaluation will be more subjective than objective. An example of such the question wording:
You took part in our workshop. Based on your experience, would you say you were extremely satisfied with its contents?
Tip: Do not include any questions that already imply a desired answer in the workshop evaluation form. Be more neutral - “Based on your experience, how satisfied were you with its contents?”
Be careful with multiple-choice questions
You also need to be very careful when using this type of workshop evaluation question. Multiple-choice questions that do not offer all possible answer options are naturally difficult to respond to. However, a huge number of answer options makes the question hard to process. The order of multiple-choice answers should be intuitive and consistent, and you should follow a logical answer order to avoid confusion, which again will affect the evaluation results.
However, there are situations when it makes sense to randomize, i.e. not to follow a logical sequence in the answer choices. This technique is used in complex and long evaluation surveys to increase the validity of previously given answers. But that’s a different story :)
Tip: Always add the “other” option in the Multiple-choice questions to cover omitted categories that respondents might want to specify. It is also a good idea to analyze the questions beforehand and select the most appropriate types for the multiple choice format before creating your questionnaire.
Include open-ended questions
If you do not offer at least one open-ended question in your post-workshop evaluation form, you may miss out on valuable input from participants. Such survey questions for workshop evaluation allow respondents to highlight something positive or give recommendations on what to improve — something you might have forgotten to ask about.
Tip: At least one open-ended question must be present in your form for workshop evaluation. If the workshop consisted of several parts, you can ask for free form feedback on each part by including the questions in your workshop evaluation form.
Evaluate the workshop After and Long After
- After means that feedback should be collected immediately after the workshop, while the impressions are still fresh in people’s minds. Ideally, you should do the workshop evaluation online: give the participants access to the form link during the workshop and at the end of the workshop to remind them, and then send a reminder via email within two days — it’ll maximize the chance of receiving responses.
- Long After means the evaluation of the workshop 2-3 months later. Not all workshop providers do it because it is quite difficult. However, workshop evaluation after a long time is useful for many reasons: first off, it’ll help evaluate the long-term impact of your workshop. For example, you can ask:
Have you been able to apply the knowledge gained at the workshop at work?
What effect did this knowledge have on your work practices?
Furthermore, reminding prior participants about your existence will incentivize some of them to sign up for your other workshops after the first one. You can get them interested in related workshops, for example, as a condition for obtaining a completion certificate at the end of a series of workshops.