Week 2

This week, I focused on designing my needs assessment surveys for faculty and students. I’ve been writing questions, reworking them, and researching how to best format surveys.

My survey for students with learning differences is ten questions long and mostly multiple choice. I tried to design questions that take into account both what I’ve experienced, and what I hear from my peers. Through this survey, I would like to understand how well students with learning differences think their teachers support them. Here are a couple questions I ask.

• My teachers understand what my learning and attention differences are and how they affect me.
• My teachers help me feel comfortable participating in class and small group discussions.
• It’s clear that my teachers read my accommodations before school starts.

Each of these questions have three answer options — agree, neutral, and disagree. I struggled to decide the amount of answers I would like to provide, but after some research, I landed on three answer options. If a students doesn’t have an opinion on the question, they have an option to be neutral.

Through my survey for the teachers, I would like to find out what would be helpful for teachers to see on the Veracross page. It’s currently four questions and all free response. An answer that I ask is, How much do you understand about your students learning and attention differences? This survey will be sent out next Monday to faculty.

At the end of both surveys I included a question asking if the respondent would be willing to discuss their answers further in an interview. Looking ahead, I will begin developing these interview questions, and researching how to best conduct an interview. As I’ve been working towards this Veracross support page, I am finding myself brainstorming on other support concepts and ideas that go beyond the website. More to come on this later.