Something I have been thinking about a lot recently is how both the material I teach, as well as myself, have biases that may be impacting how and what they learn. As our objective in CEP 812 is to ask and try to solve wicked questions, I settled on the question “What Biases do I, or the material I teach in 10th and 11th grade ELA, have?”. To help answer this question, I made a survey that I will be sending to all of the 10th and 11th grade ELA teachers at my school.

The creation of this survey was frankly something I was entirely uncomfortable with, as I have never made a survey before. My first draft shows this in spades, as most of my questions were directed towards myself, were redundant at times, and over all, did not allow my potential survey takers to expand and answer things themselves. 

I felt a lot better about my second draft. For one, I made sure that all my questions were directed at the person who would be taking the survey. Additionally, I eliminated redundant questions, seeing that answering the same type of questions could be fairly frustrating for the survey taker (Market Research Guy, 2020). Finally, I took a more open ended style approach to my questions. I felt that every teacher is likely to have unique and varied viewpoints and ideas of how to answer these questions, and by letting them use the space as they see fit, I would get better data. True, the data will be harder to read and quantify potentially, but I feel that with a topic like biases, being too narrow could be detrimental to the entire experience. 

References:

Market Research Guy. (2020, July 7). Survey design best practices: How to write a good questionnaire. My Market Research Methods. http://www.mymarketresearchmethods.com/survey-design-best-practices/

NightCafe Studios (2023).Taking a Survey. by NightCafe Studios, 2023 (https://creator.nightcafe.studio/)