Literacy Project: Complete!

At long last, my literacy project is complete!

For my literacy project, I worked with Mr. Boylen's 7th and 8th grade students. You may remember that we have commented on his students' KidBlogs in the past. If you have a few moments, his students are always happy to have teachers stop by and comment on their blog posts! You can view their KidBlogs here and here. 

Mr. Boylen was kind enough to ask his students to view the digital story that I created about Young Adult literature:

Then, he asked the students to complete the Google Forms survery that I created for them based on my digital story, which you can view here.

The basic idea was to show the students the video as sort of a brief introduction to Young Adult literature, and then 

Overall, I really enjoyed using Google Forms for this project. The survey was simple to create, and one of the design templates had a book theme, which was perfect. I posted the form in a blog post, and it was easy for the students to reply to it there. The process was very smooth and it was great to be able to use this technology to give a survey to students in another state!

The only thing that I found somewhat frustrating is that it ended up being difficult for me to create visual representations of the data that I chose to collect. I was looking forward to creating charts and graphs of the data I collected, but most of the questions I asked had open-ended responses, which in most cases really did not lend themselves well to charts and graphs. In hindsight, perhaps I should have included a few more questions with a given set of responses to choose from. On the other hand, the open-ended questions yielded some really fantastic responses from the students, who gave very thoughtful responses. I really appreciate the obvious effort that the students put into this!

Below, I have shared some of the data that I collected, from 60 7th and 8th grade students:

This pie chart represents the students' responses to the question that
asked them to choose their favorite type of Young Adult literature.

Since I used so many open-ended responses, pasting all of the replies here would make for an overwhelming post! Instead, I have chosen select parts of the survey to share here. I did choose to include every response to the question, "What is your favorite Young Adult book", however. So many of my classmates are currently classroom teachers, I thought this particular information might be helpful for them to have! 

Do you enjoy reading Yound Adult literature?

54 students said some variation of yes

4 students said maybe or it depends

2 students said no

What is your favorite Young Adult book?

The Rebounder

Identity Theft

Perfect

The Hunger Games (12)

Wrestling Sturbridge

Falling In

Trapped

I Heart You, You Haunt Me (2)

Caddy Ever After

Runaway

Stolen

Fever

Double Identity

Cradle and All

The Lying Game

Eat, Pray, Love

Eragon

Life as We Knew It

Squashed

Invisible

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Into No Man's Land

Freaky Green Eyes

Chicken Stripes

Friday Night Lights

Elsewhere

Twilight (2)

Safe Haven

Before I Fall

Wild Life (2)

Flawless

The Fault in Our Stars

This is Not a Test

Peak 

Campfire Weenies

The Hobbit

(Undecided) (2)

Comfort

Jane Yolen

Summer Ball (2)

Thirteen Reasons Why

Soldier Boys

Slam

Boot Camp

The Running Dream

The Hardy Boys

Snitch

The Host

Lord of the Kill

Harry Potter

What are two books you read recently and enjoyed? What did you like about them?
Room & Firefly Lane: "written from an interesting perspective and led me to think about situations in a different light"
White Fang & Wild Life: "involved the outdoors and made you want to keep reading them"
Among the Imposters & Slob: "something new happens in every chapter"
Reached & Crossed: "based on the future of what America could become"
Harry Potter & The Hunger Games: "action, fast-paced"
Devil's Arithmetic & The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: "something exciting or thrilling on almost every page"
Double Identity & Troy High: "very interesting...realistic"
Air Raid Pearl Harbor & Baseball Great: "felt like I was in the book"
The Hunger Games & The Lost Hero: "very addictive... once I read it I couldn't stop"
Eldest & Firestar: "dragons"
Into No Man's Land & Never Stop Pushing: "influential, inspiring and historical"
The Diary of Anne Frank & Perfect: "talked about real people and their lives and things that can go wrong"
The Hunger Games & The Bomb: "keeps you on your toes... when you think things will slow down they speed up"
Radiance & Freaky Green Eyes: unpredictable... relate to many decisions in your life"
The Devil's Arithmetic & Backfield Package: "full of suspense"
Sarah's Key & Lush: "like you are there watching"

What makes a Young Adult book great?
"shows real life problems and stories"
"about kids our age most of the time and situations we could be in"
"stories you can relate to"
"a fast-paced plot, interesting characters and surprise twists"
"love, or drama"
"make you feel like something of the sort could actually happen to you"
"lots of action"
"adventure"
"keep you guessing until the end"
*An overwhelming majority of the students surveyed mentioned here that they like books about characters and situations they can relate to.

If anyone is interested in viewing the full results of my survey, just leave me a comment here and I would be happy to share the Google Form.

I hope you all found the results of this survey as interesting as I did! I think it's very significant that out of 60 students surveyed, only 2 students reported disliking Young Adult literature. Clearly, if we want to get students interested in reading we have an enormous genre to explore.

Once again, I would like to say thank you to Mr. Boylen for asking his students to participate in this project for me. Thank you also to all of the students who took the time to respond! I greatly appreciate your feedback.