Talking Points as End of School Survey

At the end of last school year I had students complete a survey to help me improve, but it took a long time and I think students just started clicking anything towards the end because it was the end of the school year and they were just done.

This year, I decided to use talking points in lieu of a end of school year survey. Hearing their discussions gave me better feedback on what they thought about the class and what they learned during the class then the survey from the previous school year. I’m considering doing talking points as a sort of informal pre / post test at the start and end of each unit.

Here are my talking points for Geometry and the results:

I also listed the major (and memorable) tasks that we did all school year and asked students to identify the activities that were their favorite, least favorite and the ones where they learned the most. It was a good way to have students discuss and recall the activities that we completed throughout the school year. Here are these results:

Kahoot is popular and students like the interactive notebooks. I’m surprised how many students claim to have learned a lot from the Surface area with Doughnuts activity. It is also obvious that students appreciate activities involving food.

End of school year survey

Update 05/18/17:

Here is a link to my current end of year survey.

 

I want good feedback from my students, but I also want them to take it seriously & I think this survey in its current state is way too long for students to endure the entire thing. I’m considering it my question bank at this point & I plan to delete questions depending on the class. I searched for something like this to start with because I did not want to re invent the wheel, but I could not find one, so I am sharing mine so that hopefully other teachers can use it as a starting point for their own survey. (I cannot figure out how to make Google forms visible for you to create a copy without changing the original, so request access if you would like it to use as a staring point for your own class) Please comment with thoughts on questions to add or remove.

[update 6/05: My favorite comment on the survey: “I got better at actually trying.”] Woo hoo!!