Help requested: Survey of students online compostion practices

Hi Amanda,

I’d love to participate in giving you feedback. While surveys aren’t my forte, I can still contribute some thoughts and ideas. Besides general feedback, I wanted to share that I am sure other folks have done something similar. It would save you a huge amount of brainstorming to find those other survey “instruments” (as the terminology goes), and then build yours in comparison according to what did and did not work for those people. I would dig through the socsci and pedagogy journals with mention of anything like this and see if they list their instruments or if the authors would share theirs with you.

One question I want to through in the mix is that CUNY is one of the most diverse university systems in the world. Given the strong population of ESL students, how will you account for that? I’m not sure if you were ever a Writing Fellow, but Denis Paoli at Hunter who runs the Writing Center has a lot of thoughts, material, and knowledge about this that would be a huge boost for you in this area. And he’s just fabulous and will be so excited about your work.

It sounds like a great study! I’m excited to see what you find!
Jack

Hi Amanda,

In addition to what Jack’s contributed, I’d also encourage you to think about using a secure site for storing your data. My understanding is that by using google forms, google then owns your data. Just something to think about.

I’ve used the CUNY Opinio system and that worked fine, and I’ve also pre-tested Survey Monkey but that’s a paid service if you want to use more than 10 questions.

Hope this is helpful,
SKG

A couple of my students have used Opinio and have said it works well.

Howdy again,

I don’t know exact journals but I would look to communication studies and psychology journal databases and search in there. I would see what folks at the Anenberg Ctr at UPenn are doing because your research overlaps in cool, new ways with what I have heard about folks doing there.

Also, the GC really should look into Qualtrics. There is a rep who keeps trying to get us to buy their services but doesn’t know who to speak to at the GC. It has the same price as Opinio and much easier and greater functionality. Opinio will be fine though.

Lastly, when you have your data, I suggest looking into hiring a psych grad student who does stats in all of their work. They can sit with you for a few weeks, a couple hours a day a week, to run regressions, etc., with you if you don’t know how. I did this recently and it was a huge, fun, and smart learning experience that was worth what I spent. I had taken stats my first year but it had been so long since I applied them. You’ll find really awesome things in your data through statistical graph analyses you might not otherwise know. Or you know R? Or R is calling you? 😉 If the latter, Evan Misshula is awesome in this and should do some (livestreamed, eh hem) IRT sessions on it because he’s fabulous and so instructive.

Cheers from the north,
Jack