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Spreadsheet of Survey Data Collated by Type of School

An online version of our spreadsheet with the survey data collated by type of school can be found here. It collates the data from the first 100 sets of answers on the Survey Monkey National Survey of Writing Programs.

The first step in this process was to decide how best to divide up the information. We chose to divide the information up by types of school to see if the answers to each question were universal, or of the results differed from two year colleges to public research universities. Clearly there is difference between these two kinds of school because if nothing else one school requires two years of study and the other requires four years. The question then became are the trends noticeably different in terms of requirements and pedagogical approaches. So, if a student is a basic writer is there something they may learn at a two year college that they might not learn at a research university? If the trends existed, then they were not made obvious on the initial analysis on the survey.

We decided that in order to find trends, it was necessary to make a spreadsheet so the information could be reanalyzed. By making a spreadsheet the results could also be reorganized into charts and graphs. By making charts and graphs the trends were easier to identify.

I order to make the spreadsheet the first step was to call up each school’s individual responses and record each individual response on a separate piece of notebook paper. Each of the seven sections had it’s own page to record the results from the 76 schools. After moving the information off the website, the next step was to move the information on to the spreadsheet. After making the spreadsheet, we decided that the next step was creating graphs. Initially it looked like this was going to be a lot of work, but actually it was quite easy. All we had to do was highlight each question on the spreadsheet and then press the “Charts” button and select the model we wanted.

When viewing the spreadsheet it is critical to know that the schools could provide more than one answer to each question. That is why the numbers do not necessarily match up for each question.

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