What we propose for our final collaborative project is to create a survey given to students that will help reveal why the school’s graduation rate is so abysmal and why the transfer rate is so high. How we plan to approach this problem is to create a series of strategic questions that will ultimately show some sort of correlation that will assess these areas.
To proceed, we know that we have to take into account the vast amount of factors such as ethnicity, income, age, possible dependents, family matters, and 5 point scale questions that will ask about the satisfaction of education, facilities, and school services such as job placement help, tutoring, etc. We will also incorporate a short paragraph box for students to add any other relevant information or additional comments. We hope that with a large enough sample size; we will be able to reveal some sort of pattern.
We estimate that if the person seriously took the time to rationalize about each question, it will take anywhere from 20-45 minutes to complete the survey. To some, we know that it might be a bit lengthy but we want to be as thorough as possible with our questions and expect candid answers.
We know that our project will be compelling because it will provide valuable insight about the schools quality of education, satisfaction of student services, and effectiveness of classes through the feedback of students. With the results, we hope that we can build around these areas to improve the school’s statistics. It is important for the course because it will involve collaborating with other students in the class and most importantly will not be possible without the help of our classmates and students in the school.
Moving forward is our conceptualization of the project. Our project is broken up into multiple components: the questionnaire, the results, visual representation and a description of our project, a flyer to gain publicity, and we derived each question.
Some of the required research that we will need to do is to first look at similar surveys and how we can modify it to fit our own survey. We understand that our project isn’t the first to accomplish the same topic, so we need to look at others and understand the reasoning and relevancy. Most importantly and where the bulk of our research will reside is research what factors might determine a school’s graduation rate and transfer rate. Following up on that, we need to do research on what facilities, services other schools have that ours do not possess to see if there is some sort of correlation. We also need to learn how to plot our data for a visual representation which will probably be the most challenging part of this project.
For the division of labor, there isn’t an absolute definitive task that each member will administer. However, if there were tasks that each member will focus more on, Rosa will compose the questions, Ogulcan will talk about the rationale behind the questions, and Calvin will create the visual representation. We will all contribute together in doing research for all the components of our project and getting exposure for our survey. We will ask class mates, clubs to participate to get as large of a sample size as possible.
Our methods of communication will be through phone, Skype, emails and setting up group meetings outside of class. This includes a well balanced basis where we have a combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication.
We will learn how to communicate verbally with others and with each other from this project. We will learn if our hypothesis is true or not. We will learn how to be better team associates and how to work in a collaborative environment.
This is what we hope to achieve with the given time frame that we are given. We will constantly make iterations as we see fit to help improve usability and accuracy of what we aim to provide.
