International Student Survey

Introduction

My students and I found the great disparity between the responses of scientists and students for survey questions 4 & 5 very interesting. We discussed the possible reasons for such a disparity. Our discussions focused on the influences that affect opinions. The students identified research, logic and proven facts as the influences of the scientists. They also identified the media as their major influence.

We were curious if the opinions of middle grade children in other countries were as affected by the media as they were on this particular topic. We decided to contact teachers in other countries and ask them to poll their students and send us the results.

Students researched teachers in other countries through epals.com. Students then sent teachers a letter that explained what we were doing and why. The letter was orignally written by me but each student took the letter template and adjusted it to include themselves and the teachers they were sending it to. Students sent over 200 letters to teachers from the following countries:

We hoped to collect enough data to analyze and draw conclusions. Unfortunately, our response percentage was incredibly low. Only two teachers polled their students and submitted the results. The number of students polled were to low to adequately compare them with ours. We discussed the possible reasons for the low return and came up with the following conclusions:

• the letter was too long and teachers did not understand it
• many teachers do not check their email
• teachers were not interested
• we did not send enough letters
• negative feelings towards the U.S. due to the crisis (at the time of the project the war did not yet begin) in Iraq

We did receive data from two teachers, one was from Poland and the other was from Germany. Students graphed the data but it was not enough to give us proper samples of middle grade children from those countries. The results can be found on the International Survey Results page.