Using surveys to gather data, assess, communicate

    In the past year, I’ve used a lot of surveys which have really helped in gathering data for students to work with, in assessment of student learning, and in parent communications.  I use SurveyMonkey http://www.surveymonkey.com/ but Zoomerang would work just as well.  Both have free versions.  I put links in Moodle or in emails.  I tried embedding in Moodle, but some students couldn't access the surveys, so I don't embed surveys any more.

Gathering Data

    At the start of the year, when I might not know my students all that well, I find out a little bit about their attitudes toward my subject (English) and what they’d like to learn.  At the end of the year, I ask which topics students enjoyed most/least, what I should do more of, and advice they’d give next year’s students.  The feedback was valuable http://adventuresonlineteaching.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-students-like-about-moodle.html and helped me make changes to improve learning. http://adventuresonlineteaching.blogspot.com/2011/06/student-survey-helps-me-improve.html

    During our media literacy unit, we used a survey to determine how much time students spend with different media, and any difficulties they had experienced (strangers, bullying, etc.)  We then used this as the basis of discussions, writing, and math and graphing work in Excel.  http://adventuresonlineteaching.blogspot.com/2011/04/using-surveys.html  

Assessment

  Surveys are good for pre-tests – what do you know and what do you want to learn?  The free SurveyMonkey account won’t allow you to download a spreadsheet, which would make surveys better for tests, because then you could see who gave which answer; with the free account, copying and pasting makes this possible, but is more time-consuming. 

    For a part-way through a unit assessment – just to see what questions can be answered correctly – a survey could be helpful.  

    I don’t usually attach a grade to a survey.  There are really no controls with free surveys to assure me who made which responses.   But there are many assessments I do that aren’t graded – they tell me how I’m doing and how the class is doing.

Parent Communications

    Last year, I asked parents which communication modes I used which were most useful to them.  I wrote about that here:  http://adventuresonlineteaching.blogspot.com/2011/05/parent-survey-says-communicate.html  I want to ask some of the same questions at the start of the year, and ask for other suggestions.

    It’s easy to create a survey and there are many different kinds of questions possible, including short-answer, essay, multiple choice.  It’s possible to require an answer to a question, to control whether the survey can be taken from the same computer, to include page-breaks and choose color. The free version of SurveyMonkey is limited to 10 questions, but I find that fits well with my students’ attention span.

    I’m setting up my start of the year surveys, modifying questions, clearing last year’s answers, curious to see how the answers will change.

    For Surveymonkey tutorials and guides, see http://help.surveymonkey.com/app/tutorials/categorylist

Parent survey says communicate!

I did a SurveyMonkey survey of my middle school parents to find out how best to communicate with them in the future. In 5 days I heard from more than half the parents. Interesting results:

Nobody wanted Skype or WebEx/Elluminate-style parent conferences, mostly face-to-face (71%) email (52%), and telephone (24%).  But parent conferences weren’t even that high on the list of “ways to find out what’s happening in my child’s classroom.”

The ways parents found most helpful to learn what was happening at school were (with parents choosing more than one):

• Edline progress reports 96% (This also showed up in comments, with parents complaining about teachers who rarely update progress reports). Edline allows us to post progress reports at the assignment/test level that come right from the gradebook at any time. This shows parents how their kids are doing at the assignment/test level as of today. They like it. What does this mean to teachers? Take the extra 5 minutes to post your grades to the online gradebook and upload progress reports about the grades to Edline. There are many gradebook/progress report packages available for schools. For those who use Edline and need a refresher click on http://justintimepd.pbworks.com/w/page/28229813/Posting-to-Edline
• Emails about my child 92%    Easy to do via Edline, and you automatically get a copy of the email sent to your school email address. Not sure how to do it with Edline? Click on http://justintimepd.pbworks.com/w/page/28230040/Communicating-by-email-in-Edline
• Emails about class activities 83%   You can send an email to the entire class via Edline – great way to introduce a new unit, a field trip, a problem that arose in class, a major assignment. These are their children. Parents want to know what they’re doing. Based on the number of emails I got from high school parents this year in response to whole class emails, I’d say high school parents still want to hear from us. Not sure how to do it with Edline? Click on http://justintimepd.pbworks.com/w/page/28230040/Communicating-by-email-in-Edline
• Conversations with my child 79%
• Class web pages (Edline) 75% Not sure how to make your Edline class web pages more useful and appealing? Click on http://justintimepd.pbworks.com/w/page/28229923/Making-Edline-pages-appealing-and-useful
• School email newsletter 67% If two-thirds of parents use the enewsletter to find out what’s happening, it seems like it’s worth the effort to give the editor the information so that she can let parents and other interested parties know what’s going on.
• Study guides (which I email home and post on Edline) 67%
• Report cards 58%
• Parent-teacher conferences 29%
• Looking at Moodle over parent’s shoulder 13%
• Back to School Night 13%
• Comments in Agenda (assignment book) 4%

What does this tell me? Parents want to know what’s happening in classes (class emails) and how their child is doing (progress reports). We have effective tools that don’t take a lot of time to use that help parents keep tabs on their children. Teachers often complain about uninvolved parents – but we have tools to help them be involved. We sure better use ‘em.

Using surveys

   When we studied media literacy, students helped design the survey about media use (including a separate survey for parents), took the survey, then analyzed the results.  We did most of the activities F2F in class so we could do small group work, and also to support Excel use, which is one tool that doesn’t come easily to most students.  Among our findings:  kids text a great deal more than parents do, while parents watch more TV, but both groups use Facebook. 

    I use the free version of SurveyMonkey, which is amazingly versatile – good for gathering information, and for assessing understanding – and middle school students seem to both enjoy taking surveys and seeing the aggregate results. 

    The free version of SurveyMonkey is limited, though.  In the past, I used a paper survey for media literacy, and was able to separate out the results by gender.  I discovered this wasn’t possible using the free version, since it doesn’t allow for downloading the results.  It did allow us to ask about how students use lots of media tools, though, by using the matrix of choices.  Next year, I’ll use identical surveys, one for boys, and one for girls.  (Good ol’ workarounds!)

    As the year is winding down I’m going to use another survey, replacing the past paper survey with SurveyMonkey again. Some things I want to ask are: which activities students enjoyed the most and least, what they wished we had done but didn’t, what they thought about working with Moodle, advice for next year’s students.  In the past, it took me so long to go through the year-end paper surveys, I didn’t have a chance to share the results with my students.  This year, they’ll be able to see the totals right away; we can discuss the results as a class.  Then we can all learn something from the survey, not just me.