Sunday, July 8, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Week 4: Making Sense of it All.
I have 159 surveys, consisting of 52 questions, from four schools, and a partridge in a pear tree. I was surprised how much faith has been bestowed upon me for developing the summary report. My supervisor made me understand that I have collected the data, I have worked with it, I know it so I understand what is important. After my Thursday evening CUSP meeting with Richard, I realized my supervisor was right. The data is starting to speak to me, "themes" are emerging. I am going to focus on students perspective on their: teachers, college counselors, parents, friends, and college information. I will use this to analyze what is most important to all of the stake holders in Urban Assembly, how all of these factors contribute to the pursuits of higher education. Although this is a Senior Survey, I am going to take the recommendation of verifying some of the trends in my data with the school administration in order to really qualify the information.
My critical incident for this week would have to be the realization that my suggestion of adding a comments section to the survey, did indeed provide a avenue for the students to express information that they believe to be germane to the evaluation. This is nice when an idea works out well.
My critical incident for this week would have to be the realization that my suggestion of adding a comments section to the survey, did indeed provide a avenue for the students to express information that they believe to be germane to the evaluation. This is nice when an idea works out well.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Project Urban Assembly: Program Evaluation/Senior Survey
This week we have begun our data collection process. Only the schools that have graduating classes will participate in the survey. This year there are four schools with graduating classes. The students have either utilized Survey Monkey; an online data collection tool, or paper copy surveys, depending upon the schools access to computers. Thus far, we were able to obtain 17 responses out of approximately 50 students, via Survey Monkey, of the Bronx Academy of Letters. This low amount was due to an early release of senior (first week of June) which afforded the teachers little time to insure the surveys completion.
The senior of the Urban Academy for Careers in Sports were given a paper copy of the survey during their first graduation practice. Approximately 43 of the 72 students were in attendance all of which were willing to fill out the survey. Being present while the students filled out the surveys proved to be ideal for the students as well as for myself. As the survey is quite lengthy (40 questions), I was able to encourage them to complete by simply explaining to them the importance of reflecting on their scholastic experiences, and the influence their input could have on future project development. I was also able to answer any questions, and create visibility for the Urban Assembly.
The students seemed to take the responsibility of responded honestly to the questions quite seriously. They seemed to understand the purpose of the survey and some of the students seemed quite proud that their feedback could have an impact on the experiences had by future students. I overheard one student say to another, that by participating in the survey they were “saving the future’.
The main concerns of the survey as articulated by the students were that the survey was too long, and some of the questions seemed to be repetitious. I assured them that even these complaints were viewed as valuable information that would be taken into account when constructing future collection tools. There were some students, although not many, that expressed apprehension over releasing their social security numbers. A reluctance that I thought was quite mature and understandable. When I explained that the purpose was to track them during their college education to see how far they progressed toward attaining their degree, they were very willing to submit the information.
The rest of the week will be dedicated to managing the data collection from the other two participating schools; The Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice and the New York Harbor School. I will also manually enter the paper surveys into Survey monkey.
This week we have begun our data collection process. Only the schools that have graduating classes will participate in the survey. This year there are four schools with graduating classes. The students have either utilized Survey Monkey; an online data collection tool, or paper copy surveys, depending upon the schools access to computers. Thus far, we were able to obtain 17 responses out of approximately 50 students, via Survey Monkey, of the Bronx Academy of Letters. This low amount was due to an early release of senior (first week of June) which afforded the teachers little time to insure the surveys completion.
The senior of the Urban Academy for Careers in Sports were given a paper copy of the survey during their first graduation practice. Approximately 43 of the 72 students were in attendance all of which were willing to fill out the survey. Being present while the students filled out the surveys proved to be ideal for the students as well as for myself. As the survey is quite lengthy (40 questions), I was able to encourage them to complete by simply explaining to them the importance of reflecting on their scholastic experiences, and the influence their input could have on future project development. I was also able to answer any questions, and create visibility for the Urban Assembly.
The students seemed to take the responsibility of responded honestly to the questions quite seriously. They seemed to understand the purpose of the survey and some of the students seemed quite proud that their feedback could have an impact on the experiences had by future students. I overheard one student say to another, that by participating in the survey they were “saving the future’.
The main concerns of the survey as articulated by the students were that the survey was too long, and some of the questions seemed to be repetitious. I assured them that even these complaints were viewed as valuable information that would be taken into account when constructing future collection tools. There were some students, although not many, that expressed apprehension over releasing their social security numbers. A reluctance that I thought was quite mature and understandable. When I explained that the purpose was to track them during their college education to see how far they progressed toward attaining their degree, they were very willing to submit the information.
The rest of the week will be dedicated to managing the data collection from the other two participating schools; The Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice and the New York Harbor School. I will also manually enter the paper surveys into Survey monkey.
Week Three: The Inevitable Lull
During my second week at Urban Assembly I was ecstatic with all of the data I managed to collect. Now I dub my third week " the lull of data entry." Since approximately half of the surveys that I have administered to the students were in paper version, due to the lack of accessible computers, I have spent most of the week entering the data into our database. I know this sounds like a complaint (and it is a little bit) but it has actually have afforded me the opportunity to do an eyeball analysis. It is very exciting and encouraging to see how many of the these students are planing on continuing their education at such reputable Universities such as New York University, Morehouse, Lehman and ....wait for it....Cornell University. This leads me to my Critical Incident. Upon discovering that a senior from the New York Harbor School was attending Cornell University next fall I was able to contact her and offer to help her in her acclimating to 'our' University. Low income students are most vulnerable to dropping out during their first year of higher education. If I can help one young adult to avoid this vulnerability, then it makes the 50 hours of data entry SO WORTH IT!
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