Research from last term
By way of limbering up to the research methods course about to get underway here are my thoughts on my attempt to do some research on the pupil cohort at work.
This week I finally manged to publish the results from my survey of pupils from last term. I will write about how I did this research and what I learned in broad terms without publishing the statistical results here.
The purpose of the research was to discover how many of our pupils had access to a computer at home with broadband Internet access suitable for accessing work in the school VLE, Moodle. It seemed to my colleagues and I that we could not push forward the development of the VLE without having some indication of how many children could access it from outside school. Also we needed to be looking at how we might make provision for those children who might not have computers and Internet access. We are aware of the growing scale of gov initiatives to address the digital divide, however we expect a number of children to fall through this net even so.
A questionnaire was prepared on paper which was sent home with all the pupils. Responses were identifiable initially so that they could be checked off a register to see who had replied. We wanted to get statistics for the children by year group. The personal identifying information was then removed before someone else entered the data into a spreadsheet. I had to re check the data several times as some of the sample groups were very small errors in the input had a disproportionate effect on the results.
The initial round of questionnaires bought in a return of about 30%. I then sent out via e-mail and letter further copies to those who had not responded. By the end of term we had had a response rate of 50%.
In general I think next time I will send the survey directly by post and e-mail to the parents. The survey itself was quite long and we attempted to get too much information. Next time I will have just three questions. Do you have a computer, do you have Internet access, is it broadband?
Maths and statistics not being my strong point I have a vague awareness that there may be statistical methods by which the data we have could be extrapolated to make predictions about the the 50% who did not respond. However in the absence of this knowledge the application of “common sense” to the figures had yielded some interim conclusions.
The results from the group who have responded show a disproportionately high percentage of broadband Internet access way above the national average, currently 57%
This lead me to conclude that those who did not respond largely represent the balance of those who do not have computers or internet access.
This means that overall across the school our pupil cohort have well under the national average of access to the Internet. This would be consistent with other measures of the student cohort.
It was interesting that as the returns came in I was initially impressed with the level of Internet access the pupils seemed to have, and was quite optimistic about our ability to close the gap on the digital divide. However it was only at the end of the process that the true picture emerged. It is clear that only the massive levels of investment proposed by central government will make an impact on this situation. For ourselves, once the impact of the £300,000,000 is assessed we will need to revisit this question again, a year on from the first survey.
Meanwhile we can use the data we have to work on plans for a range of after school activities for pupils and their parents.
Tags: research methods
