Assignment 5-Survey

The survey I created for this assignment was used to survey the parents of the students in my classroom.  The survey was used to gather feedback from parents regarding the student led conferences they had attended the week before.

In the initial planning of the survey, I worked with my grade partner to determine what we wanted to know about the student led conferences.  I created the survey starting with the simplest questions first. The questions focused on the experiences of the parents and the students.    I left the two last questions as "paragraph response" because I know the parents would want to share their thoughts.  I used a 5 point scale, from Strongly Agree(1) to Strongly Disagree(5) for five of the questions.   I created the survey in Google Docs Forms, then copied it to a Word document to create the paper copy.  I reviewed with colleagues and made the edits before I sent the survey home to parents.

As I worked on the survey, I kept in mind that the parents in my class would be motivated to respond to the survey, but also that I shouldn't make the survey too long to encourage parents to respond.  I sent a paper copy home and sent an email link to a Google Doc form for parents to submit.  I received a total of 13  (15 sent out) responses back, 8 online and 5 paper copies.  I had informed parents of how I was using the survey and the results.

See the survey here.
Student led conferences- Parent survey

Edits made:

Questions 2 and 3
I changed the wording of the questions, to make it less awkward.
Initial question:  Due to student led conference, I have a better picture of my child's learning.
Edited: I have a clear picture of what my child is learning from the student led conference.

Question 3.
Question: I have an understanding of my child's work habits from the student led conference.

I got unexpected response results from this question, and I am not certain if it was because of the question or because of the experience in the actual conference.
By work habits, I meant printing skills, writing the date, organizing their work properly, completing their work etc.  I think that it was possible for parents to observe that during the conference, so the high incidence of "disagree" results indicates to me that the question was not specific enough, and that I may have needed  to direct parents to observe these things in the conference.

Question 7
Question:
The activities presented
took the right amount of time to complete
took too much time to complete
took too little time to complete

I struggled with this question because I wanted feedback on the time it took to complete the conference and activities, but I couldn't come up with a perfect way to state it.  I tried several different variations, keeping more in the stem of the questions, using different words.  This was the best I came up with.

Question 9 and 10.
These questions provided invaluable information for my survey, and concrete quotes that I can bring to my administration and colleagues to encourage student led conferences as a school wide practice.  I knew it was important to include these questions, but I didn't realize the gold mine of responses I would get.
The one error I made is that because I copied and pasted to a Word document for the paper copy, the text box was on the document.  Next time I would remove the text box on paper to provide ample space for written responses.

I found this exercise to be valuable, as I recgnized that parents valued providing their opinion, and the information was useful to direct my future practice.