Ced0540: Week 3 - Creating the Survey

Although I had heard of Survey Monkey before, it was very interesting actually getting into it and creating a survey. I have really never thought about the thought process that goes into creating a good survey. Doing so reminds me of other tasks that from the outside look like no-brainers but when actually done prove to be enexpectedly laborious. Even when Ann and I started thinking about our "problem" for the group project, creating questions that accurately reflected the problem was difficult. I found I had to ask myself "Why are we asking this question? What do we want to know as a result of this question?" The questions themselves might be really good, but often times I thought they didn't really reflect what we were searching for. In addition, once people took our survey, I found that the things we discovered revealed more than what our objective was. I am interested in conducting more surveys at school, but I wonder what kind of training "professionals" go through to qualify. Seems to me you can't just slap down a bunch of stuff, and as I have stated in previous blogs, it's easy to tell when a group is trying to get you to answer a certain way. As with countless other softwares we have learned in this program, I took Survey Monkey back to my 5th graders, and they are completely loving it as well. I created a school account, and I like the fact that Survey Monkey allows for unlimited surveys. Now I'm trying to talk to them about creating surveys so that we can collect info and analyze the data. Again, I'm always so amazed at how their enthusiasm soars whenever something technical is introduced. They can't wait to start creating questions, not only because doing so is fun, but they really love the idea of creating something "real" and having real people respond to them. So suddenly an activity that started as just a little classroom experiment is blossoming into a much larger project. I hope to have them get their surveys out to the St. Ann public, students and parents. This means they'll have to think more carefully about their questions.