Pre-service teachers’ preparedness towards children with Special Education Needs: A Qualtrics Journey

Ankit Beniwal and Mandeep Kaur, September 2025

Background

How do pre-service teachers prepare to implement Inclusive practices for children with Special Education Needs (SEN) in early childhood classrooms? This is exactly the question that Ms Mandeep Kaur (Master of Education student) with her supervisor, Dr Leonardo Veliz (Senior Lecturer) from the School of Education, University of New England (UNE) planned to answer in her research project.

Mandeep aimed to leverage Qualtrics (a powerful online survey platform) for her research project. The primary objective was to equip Mandeep, a novice Qualtrics user, with the necessary skills and technical support to design, implement, and deploy a robust online survey for her data collection needs.

Challenge

Mandeep struggled with using Qualtrics for her research, stating the following: 

“As a beginner, I was completely new to Qualtrics and felt unsure about where to start. The technical aspects hindered my ability to concentrate on the core of my research.”

As a beginner, she did not have the foundational knowledge to set up a new survey, incorporate diverse question types, manage survey flow, and ensure data quality. This limitation posed a hurdle in efficiently collecting reliable data for her project. Without proper guidance, Mandeep risked errors in survey design, leading to biased data, participant confusion, and ultimately, compromised research outcomes. The need for expert assistance was evident to overcome these technical hurdles and enable her to focus on the research content rather than the platform’s complexities.

Solution

With the above challenges, and leveraging UNE’s membership with Intersect Australia, Mandeep approached Dr Ankit Beniwal (Digital Research Analyst, UNE) to provide tailored, multi-session support and hands-on guidance. The initial session focused on the fundamentals, demonstrating how to access Qualtrics, create a new survey, add blocks, and incorporate various question types. Dr Beniwal also advised on utilising Qualtrics’ in-built reports for quick insights and potential usage of NVivo software to perform a more comprehensive analysis of open-ended responses.

Subsequent sessions focused on an iterative refinement of Mandeep’s survey. Dr Beniwal identified and rectified critical areas, such as advising against manual question numbering and adding a forced response text for Other options to improve the qualitative data. Crucially, Dr Beniwal also demonstrated the use of a Display Logic to ensure participants only saw relevant questions and guided her in integrating the Information Sheet for Participants and a Consent Form to ensure ethical compliance. The final session focused on testing all of the survey flows. 

Dr Beniwal played a pivotal role as a specialised expert and technical partner, offering direct, hands-on support and imparting best practices for survey design, data integrity, and ethical considerations. This collaborative approach, characterised by clear advice and practical demonstrations, and built on Intersect’s existing digital research training program and learning resources, significantly enhanced Mandeep’s understanding and confidence in utilising Qualtrics for future projects. This ensured the project stayed on track and free from errors.

The support offered to Mandeep led to a successful design, build, and deployment of her Qualtrics survey, laying a robust foundation for data collection. The key benefits for Mandeep were self-sufficiency in utilising Qualtrics, an ethically compliant survey, improved data quality, streamlined data collection, and an efficient research workflow. 

Mandeep expressed significant satisfaction with the support provided, feeling empowered and relieved to have navigated the complexities of Qualtrics through expert guidance, enabling her to progress her research efficiently and confidently. Mandeep reflected on the collaboration by saying the following:

“This journey not only gave me the skills to design and manage a Qualtrics survey, but also the confidence to take on future projects on my own. The step-by-step guidance from Dr Beniwal helped me move past my initial hurdles, and made sure my survey was effective and ethically sound. I now feel prepared with the practical knowledge and best practices that I can carry forward into my future studies and professional work.”

With the successful design and deployment of her Qualtrics survey, made possible through Intersect Australia’s tailored support, Mandeep is now well-equipped to delve deeper into her research question. With the technical hurdles overcome, she can now focus her attention on collecting and analysing the data, and contributing valuable insights to this important area of education.

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