Standards in Trade Workshop Evaluation Supporting Statement

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The attached instrument and optional questions will be used as a post-workshop/post-training survey. The survey will be distributed to attendees of the NIST Standards in Trade Workshops for which registration is required. The attendees who will be asked to complete the survey are NIST customers, stakeholders, and participants of the workshops. Others who will complete the survey are NIST staff members who also attend the workshops or training.

This group is appropriate to survey because it represents the individuals whose views and opinions are important for NIST to understand in order to provide high levels of customer satisfaction and appropriate products and services.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

This survey was developed by an internal work team with responsibilities for planning and conducting training workshops. The documents have been pre-tested within NIST for effectiveness and ease of use. Based on the internal pre-test, it is estimated to take less than two minutes to complete the survey when multiple choice questions are completed and less than five minutes to complete the survey when a respondent completes the open-ended questions.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

To secure a high rate of response, the survey will be given to participants at the end of the training workshop and they will be encouraged to fill out the survey. An electronic version of the survey will also be provided via email and./or on the Internet. Since the majority of the participants provide an e-mail address, a thank you note with a link will be sent, following the training workshop, asking them to complete the survey if they have not already done so. The expected response rate is 80%. A follow up email reminder will be sent to non-respondents.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

The answers for each question on the survey will be analyzed and the results of the survey will be used to improve the planning of future NIST Standards in Trade Workshops. The results of the surveys will be used to comply with NIST agency-wide strategic planning requirements requested by the NIST Senior Management Board to gather data for the NIST Balanced Scorecard of strategic goals and activities in order to project future needs of the agency in 10-year increments.