Survey Links

ATTENTION, the DATES have changed!!!
Presentations are postponed to Friday, 24th (Jeffrey) and Monday, 27th (Creighton), mini lessons are therefore earlier (Wednesday, 22nd), and surveys can be emailed out earlier (Wednesday, 22nd, after my approval).
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On Wednesday, Oct. 15th, we will have a workshop to finish up our surveys.

We agreed on a deadline for your audience to submit answers to your surveys: Wednesday, November 12th.

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 for Friday, Oct. 17th. 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 surveys you test-take, and email this sheet together with some comments written in text 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 piece of 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: ______," 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 missed a day AFTER the mid-term grade: an unexcused day is worth 5 extra surveys taken! Email me those 5 feedback comments, and type in, "make up for: ..... (date missed)."


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 Monday, Oct. 20th, 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 ;-) ):

ATTENTION, date change for 2 presentations (a week later, so we'll email out the surveys earlier!!!):
On Friday, Oct. 24th, we will hear a presentation in LiveText by Jeffrey Ryden.
On Monday, Oct. 27th, we will hear a presentation by Creighton Jackson.

On Friday, Oct. 17th, we will:

1. test-take 5 surveys in class, filling in the Survey Grading Sheet, and emailing both with some comments in text format to the author of the surveys, and to me in copy (if you get done before class is over, you can take more for extra credit, or proceed with the "Letter of Introduction." This letter is mainly the same thing you wrote into the header of your survey (the part with the blood samples...), only a bit more elaborate, in a nice tone to address our audience, and if possible with an attention catcher in the first line, such as: "Do you believe that twin children have a disadvantage learning language??? At least, this is what some current research purports. I have created a survey to find out whether there is any truth in such previous observations. I'm a student of........ I would like you to take the survey you can find at this LINK, to help me find out more about this topic from experts and people who are directly concerned...... The deadline for taking this survey is..... bla bla bla." This letter will be typed into the email that contains our URL, which we will email out after I've approved of both. Don't send anything out before approval, because last year I got some complaints from the survey takers about buttons not working, mistakes, etc. We'll give our audience "simply the best" ;-)

2. repair our surveys according to our peer/teacher feedback that we got, and email me your final URL. Deadline for submitting the repaired URL to me by email is today, Friday, Oct. 17th, midnight. I'll give you the OK on Monday, Oct. 20th. Some of you might still need to make changes then, if I found a mistake. 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!!! Or, I'll block all other Internet users from seeing our blog. You alone will keep your real URL, and email it out as soon as I give permission.).

3. Search the Internet for potential email addresses for our audience (such as from self-help groups of children with disabilities, or other SIU students, or public school teachers, etc.), and add them to our list of at least 20 (!) interviewees.

If you received 5 or more feedback emails already, you may proceed with "emptying your results" which I will model. See below. MAKE SURE your "results account" is completely empty from our fake test-taking before you email your survey out to your audience!!!


On Monday, Oct. 20th, we will

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.)

If I have approved your letter and survey already, you can email them out on the 27th.

Then, we'll learn about the components of a Research Essay, and see / evaluate some examples from last year's 300 course.


On Wednesday, Oct. 22nd, we will email out all graded and approved letters of introduction and URL's!!!

Then, we will relax from the survey, and hear the next two mini lessons:

1) Katrina Kosma: That/Which
2) Charah Gates: Subject-Verb Agreement

3) and, if Charah can't come, Jamie Wolf on "Style"! Be prepared, please.)

Since on Wednesday, Oct. 22nd, we will email out all graded introductory letters with the URL to our audiences, 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 to those who published their URL's; for those who couldn't do it, I've created the URL myself after the deadline for submission on Thursday, 10 a.m. It won't result in a point loss as long as your survey was finished, since it's not your fault I didn't model how to create the URL in our last meeting.