# Toward Questionnaire Complexity Reduction by Decreasing the Questions
## 1 Introduction  
Assessment may imply a challenging task in teaching both teachers and students. Different internal and external factors have an impact on that type of assessment. From the teacher's point of view, an example of an external factor could be the distinct contexts the same student class exhibits, while a sample of an internal factor might be the teaching guide. From the student's point of view, their motivation in accomplishing an assessment task is usually related to its influence on their future post-course mark: for example, their interest is different when facing a mandatory task (such as an exam), a voluntary task (optional extra activity), or an altruistic task (teaching evaluation, learning style questionnaire (LSQ), etc.). In the case of teaching evaluation, different aspects may impact the students' interest in evaluating the teaching team, such as the design of the questionnaires, the feedbackreceived, the institution, the course, the classroom climate, the teacher, the individual student's engagement level, etc. The environment may also be an influencing factor. For example, traditional paper-based assessments may have greater participation than online evaluations [1]. Concerning the use of hand-written or online papers, the use of learning management systems (LMSs) by institutions is practically fully implanted due to this technology, which can support many educational tasks. One of these tasks is related to the data collection, and also to the analysis to a lesser extent. With these online systems, collecting data from different sources, such as questionnaires, is more accessible than using hand-written papers because the data are immediately digitalized. After that, the obtained information may be analyzed using the tools that the LMSs incorporate. However, only a superficial assay can be performed depending on the kind of the used source and its purpose. For example, analyzing the results of an exam that was conducted using a questionnaire with a certain number of questions is entirely different than interpreting the results of a LSQ composed of the same number of questions. Although the number of questions may be the same, the nature of the LSQ is more specific than the exam. Recently, the Honey-Alonso Learning Styles Questionnaire (CHAEA) [2] was used as a voluntary task in three Computer Sciences subjects with the aim of establishing the average learning style profiles of these engineering courses [3]. The average was calculated by applying a clustering algorithm to the obtained CHAEA results and, then, the connections between the marks and those learning style profiles were studied. The conclusions of that work indicate that, in that particular context, a possible connection may be determined. However, it is a fact that the student voluntary participation was low at 47%, 50%, and 40%, respectively, in each analyzed subject. Furthermore, the motivation of the students was also reflected in the grades obtained by the participants, where the participant students yielded better scores than the non-participant ones. Another study [4] along three consecutive academic years with two selected engineering subjects was performed with the same conclusions and a similar engagement. Moreover, although the group of the studied subjects was composed of different students each analyzed year, the predominant learning styles and their level scores obtained year by year for each subject did not reflect prominent variations. Additionally, courses from different branches of knowledge exhibited predominant learning styles that were different between them [5]. These facts might urge several interrogations about the reasons for the low participation in altruistic tasks formed by questionnaires and the sense of the design of the questionnaire used in those tasks. * Do students consider the time they spend on these tasks to be overly broad? For example, in the case of the CHAEA, this questionnaire is composed of 80 questions, with about ten minutes needed to complete it.