EdTec 700: Survey Design
Early in my second year of teaching 6th grade Math and Science I came across an article by my favorite columnist, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. The article was about schools in Singapore and how they had collaborated with an Indian web site called HeyMath! to raise math scores across the city-state. Naturally, I was intrigued.
After a bit of research I was able to convince my school to shoulder some of the cost associated with a temporary HeyMath! subscription and began to blindly implement it in my own classes. Initial forays proved to be embarrassing failures, but I continued to experiment with different ways of using the resource and seemed to eventually end up being able to effectively challenge the more capable students in my class while simultaneously supporting the less capable ones, which had been my original objective. It was about this time that I took this EdTec 700 course on survey use.
In the course I learned about effective survey design, implementation and interpretation and using this knowledge I designed an online survey to assess student opinions and impressions of both HeyMath! and the new class structure. Specifically I was looking for data that would aid in the impending decision to either continue subscribing to the website and implementing it in the classroom or discontinue using the resource altogether.
The data I received indicated neither a strong preference for or against the use of HeyMath! in class. Certain segments of the population seemed to have stronger feelings than others, but the general feelings about the changes were not positive enough to justify the added expenses associated with the new structuring.
Through the creation and implementation of a survey I was able to utilize data at a critical early point in an educational experiment. This allowed me to make an informed decision about the value and future of that experiment, thus saving time, money and resources that may have otherwise been misused.