Student Survey of 700+ Students: Part 1 of 2

    Most organizations craft their direction partly by involving stakeholders who have a part in the success of the organization.  Stakeholders may be customers, employees, community members, or shareholders.  But there is one organization that involves their largest group of stakeholders only peripherally in driving the mission – the school.   Schools would not move a major initiative forward without buyin from teacher and administrator stakeholders – but many hesitate to ask the student stakeholders about the new direction.

Students, Stakeholders and Surveys
    One of the best and easiest ways to begin involving students is through a survey.  You can use Google forms to easily create and distribute a survey to your students to find out what works for them and what needs work.  It’s best to make it a combination of open-ended “what do you think about…” questions and multiple choice.  Short, concise questions answered anonymously will give you the best overall understanding. 

One-to-One: The Student View
    To get an idea of what many students would say about laptops for a workshop/keynote at the University of Michigan Dearborn for the One-to-One Institute, I conducted this survey and asked how often students used their laptop on a typical day, for which subjects, and what advice they would give to schools and to other students considering 1-to-1.  Through the power of Twitter, listservs such as Ed-Tech and plain vanilla email, over 700 students from the U.S., Australia, Israel and Switzerland responded.  

One of the questions was how important the student’s laptop was for doing schoolwork.  The overwhelming response, 93%, said it was important for their academic needs.  Here’s the summary graph:

 

Further questions could include how is the use of a laptop as a device moving from school to home and other venues helpful academically? Has the laptop improved the student ability to organize, research, write, revise, publish, and present? 

Another question was, during a typical day, in which subjects were laptops used.  For the students that responded, most seemed to use the laptops for nearly all subjects.  Here’s the summary with results:

 
 

It seemed at the 1-to-1 schools that responded, most subjects used laptops on a typical day.  If you were to do this survey at your 1-to-1 school, you might want to drill down with more questions in this area.  Might there be a correlation between teacher comfort and professional development and use of laptops?  Are there certain departments that have found unique and important uses of laptops for projects and everyday work?

Part 2 will give some examples for the open-ended “comments” sections.  Many students were eager to give their opinions.

Comments

[Martin Pemberton]

Re: Surveying students online--with Zoomerang surveys, Results are updated in real-time as respondents take your survey.
look at examples
http://snurl.com/zoomresults