Week 8

This week has been pretty busy. I have been visiting AEs during third and fourth period to give my surveys to fifth, sixth, seventh and eight graders at BASIS Peoria.

I have collected a lot of data (and still compiling) and the results are pretty interesting.

Some answers fell into my expected category, some didn't and others... let's just say they were different. For example, I have a question that asks "which of the following people do you think is Muslim?" Personally, I did not know that any of my options were Muslim until I verified through multiple sources. And I had never heard of two of the celebrities that were part of my options. So I am really surprised that, so far, Cat Stevens has the most votes for being Muslim.

There are so many papers to go through, but it can be pretty eye opening and entertaining. Some kids really have a mature way of thinking and can express their thoughts eloquently while others, I can't read their handwriting, and can't write proper sentences.

The questionnaires that I really appreciated were the ones that outlined their thought processes when answering some of the questions and leaving little comments for me.

To provide some insight into how I am collecting all the data...

First, I created an excel spreadsheet where I record the basics: gender and age. Then I went through all the multiple choice options and recorded those. I tracked the country ratings, languages and the degree of correctness of the answers to "what do you know about Islam/Muslims" question.


Then, for the free response questions, I read each of the answers and compiled a list with all the answers so that I can go through it and find the most common answers/references later on.

Overall, data collection is going good so far and I will be surveying the upper school this next week.