Project: a survey

Last week I started a new project with my 4º ESO class. The project consists in writing a survey, analysing data from answers and presenting the results to the rest of the class.

Here's the presentation I used for this project:



One of the conversation topics for ISE III is role models, so I decided to use this as the topic for the survey. I asked my students to create a survey in order to find out what their peers consider role models and how they choose their role models. To make it a bit less abstract, I established some areas in which people normally find them: sports, entertainment and close personal circle. Within these categories, I allowed them to use sub-categories, such as the world of cinema, music and technology/design. 

The first step was to get my students familiarised with the term 'role model' and to give them a more neutral point of view. I gave them links to several sites so they could read about role models and what it means to have or to be a role model. These are the links I gave them:

Article on female role models

Link to Diversity Role Models, a non-for-profit organisation that promotes role models from diverse sexual orientations.

Rolemodel.net, a website about the importance of role models in general, focusing on celebrities and their influence on others. 

A class discussion about what they had read ensued. The students had realised that having a role model meant something slightly different to what they had initially thought, and their understanding of the influence a role model can have on young people was deeper. 

Then, the students were arranged into groups. I used TeamUp for this. I asked each group to choose a team leader, who would be in charge of keeping time and assigning jobs. I usually find that students don't always make the most of the time I give them for projects, so a tight deadline, a reporting system like Team-Up and a manager within each group normally take care of all this. As usual, the students had the assessment rubric at hand, so they had a fairly clear idea of the quality that was expected. 

They used Google Forms to make their surveys. I love the Google suite because its apps enable collaboration, and since I always ask my students to share their documents with me, I have visibility all the time. I can check progress, praise students, make comments and so on. 

At first, the students weren't very clear how to start making their survey. I had asked them to include some questions for statistics (age, gender, background ... ) and then, I suggested grouping their questions into sections, each section dealing with a particular sub-topic of their chosen category. This would allow the students to interpret answer results more easily. 

The students could use all different types of answers, but most of them used multiple choice, tickboxes and short answer. I helped them fine-tune the range of answers available, reminding them that surveys are purposeful questionnaires-- this proved a bit harder than I had expected, but then again, making surveys isn't an easy task. 

When they were happy with their questionnaires (and so was I), I suggested adding pictures to the questions in order to make them more appealing. After all, students from all different year levels are going to take the surveys, and teenagers like to look at pictures as well as reading questions. 

This is how far we've come. Once the surveys have been answered by enough people, the students will complete part 2 of the project, which will consist in analysing the answers and presenting their findings to the class. 

I'll update you once this is done. 

Thanks for reading!