There is a student in every class who studies for hours and still fails. Not because of ability, and not because of laziness: because of HOW they study. This questionnaire measures exactly that — planning, time, environment, technique, motivation, exams and self-regulation — and turns it into something you can actually work on.
The CHEE-49 (Questionnaire of Study Habits and Strategies) is a self-report of 49 statements answered on a five-point frequency scale, from Never to Always. It is not an exam and it has no right answers: it describes how a student works, and gives that description back in a form the tutor can use.
Fourteen of the 49 statements are written the other way round — "I start studying without knowing what I have to do" — and are scored in reverse. That is not a trick: it is what stops a student from ticking the same column all the way down and getting a flattering profile that means nothing.
It is built into the platform, translated into nine languages and free with any account. There is nothing to print, nothing to correct by hand and nothing to type into a spreadsheet afterwards.
Click on any image to see it full size.
The 49 statements are not a list: they are seven blocks of seven. Seven in each one, exactly, so that every dimension weighs the same in the overall index and the bars of the profile can be compared without correcting anything.
Deciding what to study, in what order and how far in advance: use of a diary or planner, spreading the syllabus over several days and estimating how long each task will take.
Regularity and actual use of study time: a stable routine, getting down to work without delay, planned breaks, weekly revision and resistance to procrastination.
The conditions of the place where the student works: a fixed, tidy space, materials prepared beforehand and control over distractions, digital ones above all.
How the student actually studies: surveying before reading, selecting what matters, reworking the content in their own words and checking what they remember without looking, as opposed to rereading and rote repetition, the techniques with the poorest demonstrated returns.
Why and how persistently the student studies: an orientation towards learning beyond passing, personal goals, persistence in the face of difficulty, confidence in their own effort and what they attribute their results to.
Preparing for and coping with tests: starting early, self-testing beforehand, knowing the format, managing time during the exam, checking answers before handing in and keeping anxiety in check.
The ability to steer one's own learning: noticing whether one is understanding, asking for help, checking the goals of each session, changing method when it is not working and learning from marked mistakes.
The questions are not grouped by block on screen: they are interleaved, one from each dimension in turn. Seven questions in a row about organising your time invite you to answer the whole block the same way, and that is exactly what has to be avoided.
The same 49 items are written three times, for three ages. The structure never changes — same dimensions, same numbering, same reversed items — so the scores stay comparable; what changes is the wording, because a ten-year-old and a university student do not talk about studying with the same words.
Short sentences and school vocabulary ("homework", "topics"). Designed for years 4 to 6 of primary school; in year 4 it is best read aloud with the class. Below the age of 9 self-report loses reliability and is not worth administering.
The reference version, for secondary school and sixth form. It talks about subjects, syllabus and deadlines, and assumes students organise their study outside the classroom.
Higher-education register: independent study, terms, tutorials, reading lists and exam sittings. Designed for university and higher vocational studies.
The questionnaire is already written, tested and translated: you do not have to prepare a single question. From your account the whole process is four steps.
From your account, one click creates an application of the questionnaire. You only choose the version — primary, secondary or university — and the platform writes the 49 questions for you, already translated. Each application is independent, so you can run it again later in the year without overwriting the first one.
Assign it to one of your class groups. The platform gives you an access code for the group and freezes the list of students the moment the first one starts.
Students need no account, no email address and no password: they type the code, pick their name and answer 49 statements on a five-point scale, from Never to Always. It takes them 15 to 20 minutes and there are no right or wrong answers.
The report is ready the moment the answers come in: the profile of the group, an individual profile for every student, the questions the class struggles with most, and the list of students who need attention. Nothing is queued and nothing is cached, so a correction to the scoring shows up the next time you open it.
Every dimension ends up as an index from 0 to 100, and every index falls into one of four bands. The bands are CRITERIAL, not percentiles: they answer "does this student have this habit or not?", which is the question a tutor actually has, and not "is this student better or worse than the rest of the class", which is a different one and much less useful in October.
The habit is not there. It is no use suggesting refinements: this is where you sit down with the student and build the routine from scratch.
The habit shows up now and then, usually the week before an exam. It needs a specific plan and someone checking on it for a few weeks.
The habit is established, with room to improve in specific points. Worth one concrete piece of advice, not a whole intervention.
Solid. This is what you lean on to lift the rest: a student who plans well can carry that same planning into the dimensions that are lagging.
For the GROUP: the average profile of the seven dimensions, how many students sit at each level in each one, the ten statements the class scores worst on — which is, in practice, the agenda for the next tutorial session — and the list of students who need attention.
For each STUDENT: their profile of seven bars, their overall index, a paragraph explaining what each dimension says at the level they reached, and concrete advice for the dimensions that need it. No advice is given for habits that are already consolidated: a report that hands out tips for everything is a wall of text that nobody reads.
A student ends up on the attention list for any of three reasons, and the second one is the interesting one: an overall index below 40, or three dimensions at the Initial level even if the overall index looks fine, or a questionnaire left so incomplete that no profile can be worked out. The second case is the student who "is doing all right" and whose average is hiding a real problem.
This is the report of one student of that group — fictitious, like everything else on this page. Their overall index is 46: nothing that would set off an alarm. Read on and see what the average was hiding.
Three of their seven dimensions are at the Initial level: they do not plan, they do not manage their time and they do not prepare their exams. The other four are fine, and that is precisely why their average looks acceptable.
The report puts a name to each of those levels and, for the ones that need it, gives back concrete advice. Here is what it says about this student, word for word:
You sit down to study without having decided what you are going to do, so a good part of the time goes into getting started. It is not about willpower: with no plan, every session begins from scratch. Spending two minutes deciding what today looks like changes the rest of the afternoon.
Spend two minutes before you start writing down what you will do today and in what order. · Note every deadline and exam date in one single place, as soon as you are told. · Break long assignments into pieces with dates of their own: a paper due in three weeks is three tasks this week. · When planning, estimate how long each thing will take and add a margin: it almost always takes longer than expected.
Your study time is irregular and piles up at the last moment. Studying the day before forces you to memorise in a hurry what you had no time to understand, and that is gone as soon as the exam ends. A short daily routine pays off far more than one long night.
Pick a fixed time to study, even a short one, and keep it on the flat days too. · Work in blocks of 25-40 minutes with short breaks; the break is part of the method. · Before you start, leave your phone in another room: turning it face down is not enough. · Set aside a fixed slot each week to revise what you have already studied, not just to move on.
You already use some useful strategies, but they sit alongside rereading and rote memorising, which take time and fix very little. Replacing the third reading with an outline written without looking changes the outcome more than it seems.
After studying a section, close your notes and write down everything you remember; only then check what was missing. · Turn each topic into 5-8 questions and answer them days later. · Replace the third reading with an outline written without looking. · Explain the topic out loud to someone (or to the wall): where you get stuck is what you do not understand. · Save highlighting for a second reading, because on the first one you do not yet know what matters.
You prepare exams with very little margin and without checking beforehand what you know, so you reach the test with no reliable information about your own state. Starting three days earlier and asking yourself questions out loud changes the outcome more than extra hours the night before.
Start revising at least three days before; the eve should be for revising, not for learning. · Sit a mock exam against the clock. · Look at past papers to see how questions are asked. · In the test, read everything before starting and share out the time according to what each part is worth. · Always keep a few final minutes to check.
The report does not stop at the dimensions: it points at the specific statements this student scored worst on. That is what a tutorial session can actually work with.
The student sees none of this unless the tutor decides to go over it with them. The questionnaire is a tool for the conversation, not a label to hand out.
Any self-report can be answered without reading it. Pretending otherwise is what makes these instruments useless in practice, so the report checks three things and warns you when something is off — it never silently discards a student.
The student picked almost the same option throughout, without distinguishing between questions. Read the profile with caution and, if possible, go over it with them.
The answers contradict each other across several pairs of opposite questions. The profile is still shown, but it may not reflect the student's actual behaviour.
The student answered too quickly to have read the questions. The results may not reflect how they really study.
The contradictions are caught with five pairs of opposite statements: whoever claims to plan every session AND to start without knowing what to do is not reading. The speed is measured between the first answer and the last one, and only its lower end is used — a student who stops halfway and comes back the next day looks extremely slow, and that means nothing at all.
This is what the questionnaire is really for. One measurement describes a class; two measurements, with the tutorial work in between, show whether that work has changed anything — and that is an answer very few things in education can give you.
Each application is an independent copy with its own questions and its own answers, so running the questionnaire again in May does not touch the one from October: you keep both, and you can put them side by side.
In the example above, the group moved from 56 to 68 overall, and the number of students needing attention went from six to one. The dimensions that moved most are the ones that had been worked on, and that is no coincidence: planning and time management can be taught in a few weeks, while motivation moves far more slowly. An honest instrument has to show that too.
A study habits questionnaire says things about a child that they may not have told anybody: that they cannot get started, that exams paralyse them, that they give up as soon as it gets hard. That is why students answer with no account, no email address and no password; why their surnames are stored and displayed as initials only; why the personal data of the platform is encrypted field by field; and why closing your account really does delete them.
Every profile and every chart on this page comes from a FICTITIOUS group, generated on purpose to illustrate it with the same code that computes the real reports. No real student has ever appeared on a public page of this site, and none ever will.
Creating an account is free and takes a minute. The questionnaire is already there, in its three versions: generate it, assign it to your group and read the report the same afternoon. If you would rather see the detail of every screen first, the user manual explains the whole process step by step.
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