Oct. 15th: Survey Links

On Wednesday, Oct. 15th, we will have a workshop to finish up our surveys.

At first, we will agree on a deadline for your audience to submit answers to your surveys: Wednesday, November 5th, 2008. Put this in the Intro part on top of your survey (where you have the other infos, about not taking blood samples, etc.).

Then, we'll finish the surveys. Since it is a WORKSHOP, you will be required to figure the technology out through "learning by doing," and you are also welcome to discuss with your peers and exchange ideas. Remember that there are sample surveys out there, if you don't know how a matrix has to look like, for example.

Each person needs 20 questions, at least 2 of which must be matrices, and the rest varied (single choice answers, multiple answers possible, open-ended text line, open-ended text box, etc.). 4 questions must be demographic (data about subjects, such as age, gender, years of experience, income, years of study, place of living (important if you survey about dialects and slang), etc.). 16 questions are content-based (e.g., "How many minutes of grammar do you teach per lesson?")

When you make up a Likert scale (such as: strongly disagree - disagree - neutral - agree - strongly agree), remember that it is always of advantage to have five items, not four, because some people tend to choose the middle.

Make sure all your button choices make sense, and that there are few spelling mistakes in your survey.

Also, make certain that all your survey questions lead to your purpose (your research question; what you want to find out in your essay, e.g. whether Ebonics should be considered a foreign language or not. For example, to find this out, you probably won't need to ask in the demographics, "what is your monthly income" - unless you want to prove that lower income families would support/reject instruction in Ebonics. Thus, work towards your goal, and avoid useless questions. If, on the other hand, you want to find out whether female high school teachers teach more grammar in English classes than male high school teachers, you MUST ask for their gender, and analyze their answers accordingly.)

However, you WON'T USE all of your questions in your final research essay, in which you analyze the results -- you'll pick the most important ones, or the ones that had the best results. (In case you made a button mistake, your result for this question will be screwed up since the interviewees answered wrongly; DON'T USE screwed-up questions, just forget about them. You will have to make THREE GRAPHS in the end; they will focus on three specific questions important to your research purpose. You won't make a graph out of EVERY question. Some questions are just for your background knowledge, not for graphs, such as the demographics, which you will use in the part of your research essay that deals with PARTICIPANTS. This is what the section PARTICIPANTS might look like: "The participants of this study were 20 elementary school teachers, 12 females, and 8 males, ranging in age from 25-59 years. 15 were English teachers, 1 was a biology teacher, 3 were social studies teachers, and 1 was a history teacher. 80% had more than 5 years of teaching experience, 10% had 2-5 years of teaching experience, and 10% less than one year.... bla bla bla.")

TASK 1: Email me your survey URL
When you've finished your survey, create a hyperlink for it (I will model this), and email me your URL and your topic, so I can put it out on this blog. In case you don't finish your survey in class today, email it to me after class (deadline: Thursday, Oct. 16th, 10 a.m.), so that I can put it out. It does not need to be perfect yet, because we will test your survey and give you feedback on it.

TASK 2: Testing 5 peer surveys, using this Survey Grading Sheet.
Each student needs to take at least five surveys of his/her peers for testing. You can do more if you wish. Try to spread it evenly; don't all test the first five surveys that are published, but also the last ones that come in at the deadline (Thursday, 10 a.m.). Everybody needs feedback! I will take some randomly, too. Just go to the links that will be published here, and take the surveys. Fill in the Survey Grading Sheet for the survey you test-take, and email it together with some comments to the author of the survey, and to me in copy to get your points for it.

EXTRA CREDIT opportunity: Some of you might have missed a homework (blog entry) after the mid-term grade has been announced. If you want to make up for something missed, let me know and take an additional survey - when you email me the copy of your feedback for this survey, write in it "make up for: ______ (topic of missed blog)," so that I can give you a grade for this instead.) You cannot make up for assignments missed BEFORE the mid-term grade, because those grades are submitted and won't change any more.

If you've missed a day unexcused AFTER the announcing of the mid-term grades, you can make up for that by taking 5 extra test surveys, and emailing the corresponding feedback comments to me, stating "make up for: _________ (day)."

TASK 3: Feedback email to 5 peers
As soon as you notice that something does not work, there is a spelling error, something is missing, the order of the question could be better, or you have a good question he/she could add, etc., email the person whose survey you took (you know the name; it's on the survey) and tell him/her what you noticed! In the end, you need to have sent FIVE EMAILS to the authors of the FIVE surveys you had to take. EMAIL ME A COPY of your feedback comments - even if you did not find any mistake - in this case, you tell the person what you liked about his/her survey. Deadline for emailing the feedback to your peers (with a copy to me) is Friday at class time. If you haven't done your 5 feedback emails by then, you will miss points.

P.S. For those of you who abbreviate your first name - don't do it on the survey, or your peers won't be able to email you any feedback, since I created all grammar300.com emails with your long first name!!!



Preview of TENTATIVE SCHEDULE (might be subject to change, depending on how good/fast we are/I can grade ;-) ):

On Friday, Oct. 17th, we will

1. repair our surveys according to our peer/teacher feedback. We do this by going back to "EDIT," and retyping the missing/wrong places. Then, you will create a new URL, and email it to me in or right after class. Deadline for submitting the repaired URL to me by email is Friday, Oct. 17th, 8 p.m. I will grade your final surveys on paper, and will give you the graded surveys back on Monday. Some of you might still need to make changes then, and submit them again. I will TAKE ALL SURVEY URL's off the blog when they are good to go, so that no strange people from the Internet are looking on our blog and taking your surveys, messing up the validity of your data!!! You alone will keep your real URL, and email it out as soon as I give permission.).

2. empty our "results" in http://www.surveymonkey.com/, because your peers' feedback is not from your intended audience; thus, we will delete it after having repaired/improved our surveys, to make the results account empty for the new answers of our real audience. (I will model it.)

3. cope with the letter of introduction. Your homework will be to email me your finished letter of introduction either in class, or right after class - deadline Saturday, 10 p.m.. Only if I have graded and accepted it you have the permission to use it later when you send out your survey!!!

On Monday, Oct. 20th, we will relax from the survey, and hear the next two mini lessons:

1) Ashley Epps: Pronoun - Antecedent Agreement
2) Sarah Klingler: That/Which

I will hand back the graded letters of introduction, and the surveys, which you will modify accordingly.

On Wednesday, Oct. 22nd, we will email out all graded introductory letters with the URL to our audiences. Thus, on Wednesday you need to bring the 20 required emails of your study subjects!!! You can get them from focus groups or self-help groups/parents' groups on the Internet (about twins, autistic children, DS children, children with Tourette, etc.), from the autism center at SIU if you ask them politely, from high school/middle school/elementary school teachers anywhere in the U.S., from people you know, from fellow students, etc. You're not allowed to ask SIU faculty!!!

Then, we'll wait for 1-2 weeks for our results to come in (depending on the deadline we agreed upon). In the meantime, we'll do mini lessons, learn about how to do the statistics for the research essay (xls graphs), learn about the components of the research essay and its required format, and evaluate some sample research essays we created in grammar300 last year. If you're willing to let me use YOUR RESEARCH ESSAY for next year's grammar300 students, please let me know in an email!!! (You can do it after you've received your research essay back in December, and know your grade, or you can do it in general. If you want, I'll take out your name (indicate that!). Your collaboration would be greatly appreciated - you are allowed to see last year's examples throughout this course, too! ;-))

Links to our PRELIMINARY SURVEYS for testing:

Thanks for all who posted their URL's! If you were not able to do so for technological reasons, I've done it for you after submission deadline, Thursday 16th, 10:00 a.m. It won't result in a point loss for you, as long as the survey was complete, because it is not your fault that I didn't model last time how to create the URL's.