Friday, February 24, 2017

What have we done?




This snapshot--indicating the participation thus far in class surveys I am running--is part of a story about what strange things we've developed in youngsters.

I created a survey--one for each class period--to ask students about their sense of readiness and capability for the SBAC, the annual standardized test.  I emailed to both students and parents to ask that the students do the survey, and I included a link right to the survey appropriate to their class period.

Over night, I got 9 responses from the first group--which now has 15, 2 from the second, which now has 7, 1 from the third, and none from the fourth and fifth.  

12 total responses, out of 115 students.

When I told the class that had 9 (out of 25) that they had done the best, one student exclaimed, "Can we have a pizza party?"

I was despairing already--about how badly they'd done with their Parts of Speech work, so I slipped.  And my response was, "You know how many pizza parties we had when I was a student..?  NONE!"

A pizza party!?  Because barely 1/3 of the students had taken a 2-minute quiz...and they just happened to outperform the other 4 classes!?

Years ago, I asked what consequence the Wow! Effect of things like letter learning with singing birds on iPads would have.  I wonder if pizza parties for answering a 7-question survey is the answer.

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