Creating a Survey for Formative Assessment

One of the projects required this week in our Assessment in E-learning class was to create a pre-course survey for our final projects.  My final project is an online version of a literature circle utilizing Web 2.0 tools to help facilitate discussion and assess student comprehension of literary text.

My pre-course survey is designed to give me information about my student’s current reading habits, attitudes, and abilities.  I am a firm believer that the only way to become a better reader is to read, but comprehension may be facilitated through reflection and collaboration. Reading is unique in that it is both highly personal, but can be extremely social as evidenced by the popularity of book clubs and social reading sites such as Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, etc.

In order for a literature circle to work to its fullest potential, everyone must read the text individually.  Therefore, several of my survey questions focus upon the individual student’s reading habits and attitudes towards reading.  I need to know who my passionate readers are as well as those who are more reluctant or hostile to reading.  Other questions focus upon the books that students enjoy reading and the ones that they hated or could not even finish.  This will give me additional information on the types of literature the students like to read.  In this way, I will be able to give students a voice in the literature selected for the current class when I create the literature sets for the different literature circles.

I used my favorite survey creation tool SurveyMonkey to create a pre-course survey for my Collaborative Comprehesion Course: Click here to take survey .