#freebookmarks for your #schoollibrary - Spring Bookmarks

Here are some bookmarks inspired by the change of seasons, which is just around the corner in Australia.

Made in Canva, we print these off on 160gsm card through our colour copier.

Download the image and print as A4, splice and go!

Getting students to fill out survey's

We gather data for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is to be able to make informed decisions within a school environment. Without data we are stabbing in the dark and hoping for a good result.

Ross Todd (2015) talks a lot about Evidence Based Practice (EBP) and guiding decision making and programs using evidence.

When school library staff are developing or running programs, often we are doing it with a class that isn't our own. So getting information or data out of the class is often a monumental task!

Emailing students a survey to do in their own time, your response rate might be 30-40% of the intended recipients.

So how can we get a more complete dataset from our students?

If left to our own devices, many people will put off doing a survey unless there is an extrinsic motivator; a reward or a due date.

In a school if you are collecting data from an entire year level, then you would want that dataset to be complete.  For our Year 7 'Drop Everything and Read' Campaign, the dataset is n=138.

Our first initial response to the weekly reading tally was a 40% response rate. Prompts sent out to classroom teachers to remind students to complete the survey, raised it up over 62%. Direct instruction from teachers resulted in a jump to 82% and the Year 7 English teachers will followup with students who have not completed the survey so that we can aim to have a 90% complete dataset.

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Why is a complete data set important?

With this project we are hoping to show that Teacher Librarian intervention and a well planned campaign will increase reading habits throughout a year level cohort. If we get positive results back, we can then then use this data as part of our planning for 2020. Without this data, there is no evidence that our interventions are working to improve recreational reading.

Do it by hand?

Of course, if we got the students to complete the survey by hand, we might get a more complete data set to start with. However, we would have to manually enter in the data by hand. With limited time and resources, this option is not preferable!

References:

Todd, R. (2015). Evidence-Based Practice and School Libraries: Interconnections of Evidence, Advocacy, and Actions. Knowledge Quest. Accessed at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1048950