“In the absence of information we jump into the worst conclusions” Myra Kassim, management consultant
1. THE ROLE OF A SURVEY E-PLATFORM
A class “climate” social conditions and a good atmosphere for learning are necessary to successfully teach and achieve a level of motivation in class. However, compared to e.g. grades or overall results of exams, they are harder to be verified. Teachers who faithfully work with their students usually develop a feeling for the class social climate und possess the know-how and repertoire to create the right atmosphere for teaching. How well the teacher’s impression matches the actual situation can only be checked using professionally developed surveys.
2. A FEW WORDS ABOUT SURVEYMONKEY
We used “Surveymonkey” , an US-American enterprise that supplies interactive platforms for creating, carrying out and evaluating surveys. These can be created by using a variety of question-generators and can be worked on using computers as well as tablets or Smartphones. Using their very simple menus, it is possible to create very detailed surveys and to filter their results under different criteria.
The 1999 founded platform is being used by millions of clients, which can choose between a free and a premium version. For the use of teaching and especially for the Erasmus-project itself, the options the free version offers are more than enough, while greater and more detailed surveys should definitely be created using the full version.
3. OVERALL BENEFIT
The surveys based on the website “Surveymonkey” are often used for pedagogical work and are very useful to assess the students ‘satisfaction at school or to find out about mobbing in everyday school situations. It is also very appreciated by students.
4. OUR EMB EXPERIENCE
Working with the webpage related to the Erasmus-project we decided to keep the questions relatively easy, so the students could easily answer them without the need to have any previous knowledge.
Next to general, rather statistical questions as students’ age or sex, we asked the students how far they themselves ever became a bully, a bystander or a victim in any way at their school.
We also wanted to know how comfortable each student felt at their school and in their class community, if they enjoyed going to school and if they thought of their lessons as interesting and important. The general feeling of enjoyment and satisfaction at school has widely been examined and correlated to bullying in numerous psychological researches and surveys, thoroughly presented in the book “ New Perspectives on Bullying” by Ken Rigby 2002.
For a more objective analysis of all the schools’ results, we decided that each country would have around 100 students of different ages take the survey. The total number of students participating in the survey each of the two years rises to about 1000, thus being a very broad data base for surveys on this issue. (See also “New Perspectives on Bullying” by Ken Rigby 2002)
To find out in what way the strategies we developed through our project helped our fight against bullying, segregation and if they contributed to the enhancement of our schools’ climate, we took the survey at the beginning and at the end of the project to compare the results.
