Thursday's class was such a great discussion! It really shed a new light on just how difficult it can be to write a survey that is to produces desired results, whatever they may be. And even with a great survey, the genre of a survey is limited and can not tell you certain things. For example, the survey we looked at can provide the percentage of students who felt that they were good writers, but it can not provide insight on what exactly made these students feel this way. Thus with surveys, I feel one can really only produce, at best, truncated data. After all, how precise can someone be with only 4 fixed responses to choose from.
Another thing this analysis brought in to focus was language. I think it was this, in fact, that really got the discussion rolling. It was just so many technical words. At first, I thought that the one we were looking at was the one freshman were given, and had it been, it would have been completely unacceptable. We commented on how phrases like 'discourse analysis' would be foreign to most incoming freshman, and in using phrases like this, it was like we were expecting them to be adapted to our discourse community, though they had not joined yet. If I remember correctly, we said for most, the language would go completely over their heads.
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