Forms for Self-Evaluation

Google forms provide a very powerful tool to make me more efficient as a depute. I'll be writing a series of posts describing how forms help me with many aspects of my job.

One of the key roles of a depute is to lead self-evaluation in school. If we don't know where we are, how can we know which direction to head in? Google forms [other online forms such as Surveymonkey are available!] allow me to survey teachers, students and parents quickly and easily. And because the results feed directly into a Google spreadsheet, I can easily analyse the data I gather.

Here's a real example: my school is prioritising the nurturing of a growth-mindset culture amongst students and teachers. In order to establish a baseline, I issued a survey to all S1 and S2 (yr 8 and yr 9) students at the beginning of this school session, which assessed their mindsets, and their beliefs about the mindsets of teachers towards them. Here's a copy:

https://goo.gl/KcDfy4

Creating a form is as simple as going to the google drive homepage ( https://drive.google.com) and going to new>more>Google forms.  Once you have created the form you get a link to share via the "send" button. If you are operating within Google Apps for Education, you have the option to require a login to your system in order to access the form, and can log usernames (not usually a good idea if you want honest submissions!)

 All our S1 and S2 students do either business education or computing every week, so it was quite straightforward (with the agreement of my wonderful faculty head of business and computing!) to have them complete the survey in class.

Once the students had completed the form, all the data was automatically stored in a Google spreadsheet, where the system produces elegant summaries of the data:



This is already very useful. I'll issue the same survey to students in August and we will have a clear idea of the progress we have made.

Having seen the raw data, I was very interested in the correlation between different answers - were the students who viewed mistakes as an important part of learning more likely to enjoy being given feedback, for example? We would imagine so. In order to explore this, I downloaded the data into an Excel spreadsheet, and used the "correl" function to produce a big chart showing all the correlations between the different answers (Google sheets lacks this function). By and large, they matched exactly the correlations that Dweck's work would predict. In the example above, those students were indeed more likely to enjoy being given feedback. This reassured me that our work to nurture growth mindsets was not simply based on the work of an American academic. We now knew that those students in our school who had a growth mindset (believed that they could increase their own intelligence) were more likely to have a raft of other positive attitudes towards learning. This was an exciting confirmation.

I have used Google forms for the following self-evaluation activities, amongst many others:

• pre-surveys before running CLPL sessions, to help me tailor the session to the actual needs and prior learning of staff
• CLPL evaluations
• Having students evaluate me as a teacher
• Having students write reports on themselves