[CBW_Exec] A second item for your consideration (BWe and CBW membership)

Wed Sep 2 09:46:49 CDT 2009

Hi Kelly,

Deborah Mutnick and I met today to edit the BW survey, which we plan to
disseminate in mid-September. We have made minor adjustments in the survey
based on people's feedback, and we'll mention how we dealt with the issue
you raised in your e-mail below.

Thanks so much for your involvement with this project and for helping us to
fine tune the survey. Deborah and I will probably pay for a month membership
when we go public with it because we're hoping to get more than 100
responses. We're also thinking about how to involve a graduate assistant or
recent Ph.D. in doing some analysis or further research based on what we
find.

Hope you had a wonderful summer. Congratulations on the recent publication
of your book. I think I saw it included in an NCTE catalog.

All the best,

Rebecca & Deborah

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Kelly Ritter KARITTER <KARITTER at uncg.edu>wrote:

> Hi Rebecca:
>
> One thought about the survey--and I'm so sorry I didn't catch this before.
> For question #8 ("if your institution doesn't have BW. .  . ) there are a
> couple of potential problems. First, the survey assumes that one's
> institution *does* have BW, or else the previous questions are not
> answerable (I tried to take the survey, for example, and then realized I
> could not, b/c we do not offer BW), and so Q8 only applies if none of the
> above questions do (see what I mean?).  Second, survey monkey won't allow
> people to "skip" questions--so you would also need a "not applicable" option
> for this question, if you were to keep it in the survey.
>
> One way to do this is to make "not applicable" a response to the other
> questions above as well--about one's BW program title, focus, etc.--so that
> people like me could answer Q8 and the other demographic questions without
> having to answer the other BW program questions.  This would give you a
> wider net of responses, though you would probably want to cross-code them to
> see which came from people at institutions with BW programs, and which came
> from people at institutions without BW programs.  If you pay for a
> membership on survey monkey, this higher-level cross-coding is possible in
> the results reporting.  Or, you can look at the results manually and code
> yourselves.
>
>
We're trying to keep the survey as simple as possible, and so this is how
we've dealt with this issue: We changed the first question about the
respondent's institution so that it doesn't refer to basic writing (we had
to make this question and identifying the institution a required
question--the only one that's required) because otherwise we would have no
way of knowing if several people from the same institution filled out the
survey, which would really mess up the data.

Then we moved the question about "if your institution doesn't offer BW" up
from no. 8 to no. 3, so that people who really don't have BW at their
institution won't answer the questions that follow. Most of these
questions really are not applicable if they don't have BW at their
institution. But they could still volunteer for a followup interview (last
page) if there's an important story about why they don't have it or why they
no longer have it.

> Again, sorry to not mention this earlier--I'm only sending to the whole
> Exec board in case my idea duplicates what someone else might have also
> noticed.
>
> Kelly
>
> Dr. Kelly Ritter
> Associate Professor of English
> Director of Composition
> University of North Carolina at Greensboro
> Greensboro NC 27402
> karitter at uncg.edu
>
> -----cbw_exec-bounces at tamu-commerce.edu wrote: -----
>
> To: Conference of Basic Writing Executive Board <
> cbw_exec at tamu-commerce.edu>
> From: Rebecca Mlynarczyk <rebecca.mlynarczyk at gmail.com>
> Sent by: cbw_exec-bounces at tamu-commerce.edu
> Date: 06/04/2009 05:41PM
> Subject: Re: [CBW_Exec] A second item for your consideration (BWe and CBW
> membership)
>
>   Hello everyone,
>
> Using the comments we received at the CBW workshop in March and with
> excellent assistance from Kelly Ritter, we have streamlined the National
> Survey of Basic Writing to make it more user friendly and quicker and easier
> to complete.  Again in response to feedback at the workshop, we've decided
> to put it up on Survey Monkey; you should be able to preview it by clicking
> on the link below. Please feel free to let us know if you have questions,
> comments, or suggestions. Bear in mind that we're limited to 10 questions,
> but we do hope to be able to get more detailed information from respondents
> who fill out the form at the end.
>
> This is our first experience with Survey Monkey, so also let us know if you
> encounter any technical problems. Once we're sure the Survey is in its final
> form, we will decide on the most effective way to disseminate it.
>
> Rebecca and Deborah
>
> http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xHqm3g7tYx7ildvliwJMMg_3d_3d
>
>
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