Students Respond to Survey

Prior to teaching the mini-research paper process to my senior English students and as a precursor to our Social Psychology unit in AP Psychology, I surveyed them on their use of technology, what technology means to them, web sites they use, what they thought about adult monitoring of online activity, technology access and other related information. The questions were developed by group participants in the ASU course I am taking (Eng 598) "Media Matters." In addition, I added access questions to inform me as Fran and I work through our action research project, "reading strategies in the research process" into which we will integrate information literacy skills and the use of technology. Back to the ASU group mini-research, our group responsibility is to interview 3 students about their technology use each and post their responses so that our group may share the data. Fortunately, one group member is going to compile the results from two sections, and I will figure out how to compile the other classes' data. I will report on this findings as they unfold.

When I administered the surveys in my classes last week, I took two approaches. In my AP Psych class, I asked the students (grouped in dyads) to interview each other and fill out the surveys that way; then I group the students in groups of four to process their responses, looking for commonalities or trends they noticed. My only regret is that I did not have a recorder going in all the discussions - they were rich and interesting and could offer further data. While they were occasionally off-task (usually relating some incident somewhat connected to the questions), their overall behavior was engaged and interested. I had explained the purposes of the data and also discussed with them creating a class wiki for Social Psychology, which they were genuinely excited about. (Sidebar: in this class, all students have access from home and are frequent users of the web; in addition, all the students in this group are strong students.)What I found interesting in talking to them and getting their feedback about the class wiki project, all of them use Wikipedia, but only a few of them really understand what a wiki is! Because this class is small and generally responsible, it is a good place for me to experiment with integrating web 2.0 technologies into my instruction.

In terms of the administering the survey to my three "regular" senior English classes, I had them respond to the questions individually on paper, then I grouped them. The activity went well and generated some good group discussion in my morning sections, but in my afternoon section, the activity didn't go as well as the social relationships among the students are weak (with some active aversion to working with others at all) and a greater number of generally unmotivated students are in the class. Just watching the difference between how this last section of the day processed the activity versus the morning session taught me more about teaching this socially and academically challenged group.