End-of-Year Surveys help teachers motivate students, maximize learning

Remember the course surveys at the end of every college class? I’ve often wondered why they’re not more commonly used in middle and high school.

Isn’t a student’s voice important to improving education?

As teachers, we collect data throughout the year about student progress on various standards we track. We know what our students can produce, but do we know how they feel about their learning? Do we know what activities they enjoyed most or what they think they learned the most from?

That’s what I set out to discover this year. I gave all of my 7^th and 8^th grade students an end-of-the year reflective survey and implored them to take it seriously. The information I gained was invaluable, and I’ll use it to help shape changes for next year.

Setting up the survey

The information you gain will depend on the questions you ask. I set up my survey with two parts: one side focused on questions pertaining to reading and the other side focused on writing. I made sure to list all of the major reading activities and writing projects to help jog students’ minds. I also made sure to ask questions that focused on what students enjoyed as well as what students believed they learned the most from. Click on the link to view my end-of-year survey 2017.

 Before giving the survey, I explained to students the difference between questions asking what they enjoyed and what they learned the most from. I told them they might not have enjoyed something we did, but it might have been something that helped them grow the most as a reader or writer. In a perfect world, both of those would overlap! The survey gave me a great deal of information to determine which units motivated students and which were most valuable.

What I learned

I thought I could anticipate the answers I would get, but I was wrong. Some of the reading and writing tasks students enjoyed the most and those they reported they learned the most from were not what I had initially suspected.

For example, I wasn’t surprised a large percentage of students said they liked doing the writing journal because they had the freedom to choose their own topics and genres of writing. I was surprised, however, that many said the journal was one of the writing activities they learned the most from, rather than one of our genre studies, because they had a chance to try out ideas and techniques freely, practice them, and receive weekly feedback from peers.

One student wrote, “I like writing more than I did last year. This is because over the year I discovered ways to clearly develop my ideas in the writing journal. I got to continue my ideas to find a product I was proud of, which showed me I can write well.”

Another student said, “I’ve grown as a writer because I’m starting to understand my style and get lots of inspiration, which has encouraged me to write more. The writing journal helped me grow the most because I felt more determined to write and write a lot.”

One student who reported the writing journal helped her grow, ended by saying, “I could also develop my own voice in my writing.”

The survey provided volumes of information that I compiled into a chart. I wanted to see where high motivation and high learning intersected. I marked the units/activities where students reported learning the most but had low motivation, so I can try new ways next year to make the same learning more fun. I also noted any units/activities that students loved but didn’t feel they learned much from.

5 reasons to use a survey

If you’re still not sure if you want to use an end-of-the-year survey, let me leave you with these points to consider:

1. A survey helps you gain a better understanding of what motivates your students. When you know what motivates them, you can try to adapt other parts of your curriculum to include these aspects.
2. When you survey students, you learn what they feel was most beneficial to their growth. While we have assessments to measure what they’ve learned, it’s a good practice for students to consider their own learning as well. Every time I attend professional development I consider what benefited me the most, even though no one gives me a test to check my learning.
3. Asking for feedback shows students that you respect them. It tells them that you value their opinion and care about what they learned. It’s empowering for students to have the final say in a class.
4. A survey provides a great opportunity to have students reflect on their learning at the end of the year. I had one 8^th grade student who messed around every day and rarely completed his work. He admitted in his survey that he didn’t learn a lot because of his actions. He didn’t blame me – he blamed himself. Hopefully, this makes him think about changing his actions for high school next year.
5. Surveying students even helps you improve your teaching – if you use the information you gain. Survey data is great information to help you change your curriculum plans a little. What units did students really love? Why? Can some components of that unit, such as choice or project based learning, be transferred to a unit that students didn’t like? Good teachers are always updating and changing units, so why not consider the feedback of our core audience?