What’s the SINGLE BEST STRATEGY to Boost Response Rates with Online Student Evaluations?

After the last few post-Halloween blogs, you’re probably sick of this topic and the dribbles of info in each blog. Sorry about that. This is the final installment on the “you know what.”


What is the BOTTOMLINE, HANDS-DOWN and UP, BEST STRATEGY TO USE? (Note: You don’t find this type of excitement and suspense in every blog. Brace yourself. Here it comes.) ANSWER: Withhold the posting of final grades. If your registrar is super-efficient at posting grades online in a timely fashion, you’re sunk. That is usually not a problem, because he or she has a bazillion courses to process.


If students are given a 48-hour window following the final exam or project within which to complete the evals, post the grades online on your course Website ASAP. Tell the students in advance both in class and online when they will be posted. That’s the academic version of a “grade (as opposed to movie) trailer” or teaser. This quick post will be perceived as a monster-size carrot or hot fudge sundae to your students. (Note: Certainly there are some courses where students can compute their own final grades, but they need the scores or grades from the final exam or project.)


We can leverage this Net Generation’s characteristics to maximize the response rates we need. Why should they bother to rate our performance? Although there may be some legitimate intrinsic reasons, why take a chance? Go after the extrinsic ones. As noted in my August 2009 blog series, these Net Geners have a need for speed, immediate gratification, and quick feedback on performance, plus they are driven to achieve, feel pressure to succeed, and expect rapid responses from us on everything. Receiving grades “immediately” feeds into these characteristics.



Institutions engaging in this practice over the past few years, including my own, have reported 80–90%+ response rates for most all courses with buckets of typed comments to open-ended or unstructured questions to boot. It might be worth giving it a whirl at your institution.


Let me know your thoughts and experiences with this issue and any other techniques you have used successfully to boost response rates.


COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

Surveys of the Net Geners: How Do We Know So Much about Them?

Over the past decade as the Net Geners were maturing, graduating high school and college, and entering graduate school or the workforce, they were surveyed and studied by several researchers. In fact, this generation has been scrutinized, interviewed, surveyed, poked, and prodded more than any previous generation. Their characteristics have been reported in more than 30 books and scores of articles. The research evidence upon which many of those publications were based was drawn from the following 10 surveys:
· EDUCAUSE (Fraud, 2000; Oblinger, 2008b; Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005b)
· College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources Survey (OnlineComputer Library Center [OCLC], 2006)
· Greenberg Millennials Study (Greenberg & Weber, 2008)
· Higher Education Research Institute (UCLA) American Freshman Survey (Pryor et al., 2009)
· National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2002)
· Net Generation Survey (Junco & Mastrodicasa, 2007)
· The Net Generation: A Strategic Investigation (Tapscott, 2009)
· Nielsen NetView Audience Measurement Survey (Cashmore, 2009; Ostrow, 2007)
· Pew Internet and American Life Project (Horrigan, 2006; Horrigan & Rainie, 2005)
· Technological preparedness among entering freshman (Sax, Ceja, & Terenishi, 2001)

There's plenty of reading to do on this generation of students. If you want it boiled down, keep reading my blogs. I am trying to synthesize the pertinent findings from the above sources.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

Is the Net Generation Tech Savvy? Part II: The Digital Divide within the U.S.

As a follow-up to yesterday's blog on Prensky's "digital natives-digital immigrants" categorizations, this blog extends the issue one step further. Jenkins (2007) says that “digital natives” implies all students share a common body of technology knowledge that they have all mastered. In fact, the term masks their different degrees of access to and comfort with the emerging technologies. Also, rather than focusing on the inadequacies of the “digital immigrants,” he argues we should recognize what they bring with them from the old world which is still valuable. Actually, a significant percentage of professionals working in Silicon Valley are “immigrants” who can probably out-compute most of the “natives.” Prensky’s digital and cultural divide between these groups also short circuits thinking about meaningful collaborations across these generations.
Another problem with Prensky’s “digital native” characterization is that it is not typical of all students. There is a digital divide or participation gap within the U.S. For example, Sax, Ceja, and Terenishi (2001) conducted a study 272,821 freshman and found that, after controlling for income, Afro-Americans and Latinos were less lightly to communicate via e-mail than Whites and Asian-Americans. People with lower incomes have lower rates of Internet use and broadband access (Horrigan, 2006; Horrigan & Rainie, 2005). Finally, students with higher incomes are more lightly to use computers to conduct research, create projects, and analyze data than students with lower incomes (Junco & Mastrodicasa, 2007).
Tomorrow, we'll examine the digital divide internationally. See you there.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

A Generation of Students "Born with a Chip"

Despite the fact that we know more about our students’ brains and intelligences, how to teach effectively, how students learn, and the technological applications to learning than at anytime previously, about 50% of college students are unmotivated, disinterested, and disengaged from classroom instruction now more than they ever have been. While in class, they may IM or text their buddies while taking notes on their PCs, Web-surfing, scanning an iTunes playlist, and reading The Color Purple (Carlson, 2005).
Where’s the disconnect? Why are they disengaged? Is this generation of students in school right now really that different from previous generations? Today’s undergraduate and graduate students who are part of this generation comprise the majority of students in higher education.
The burgeoning technology alone has had a profound effect on this generation, unlike any previous one. They were “born with a chip.” Are they significantly different? You bet! These students have grown up with Sesame Street, MTV, reality TV, the Internet, PCs/Macs, video games, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Skype, iPods, iPhones, PDAs, and TV/DVD remotes as appendages to their bodies. How über cool is that? They carry an arsenal of electronic devices with them. They are key ingredients in their world. Their use of the technology focuses on social networking, music, videos, TV programs, and games. They live in a world of media overstimulation and absolutely love it. As the lyrics to the Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle hit song from Aladdin tell us, we are entering "A Whole New World."
The technologies provide a window into this world. The students’ world is not better than or inferior to ours; it’s just different. When the students cross the threshold of the classroom door, they enter culture shock. They’re numb with understimulation. How can any professor possibly compete with their world? They can’t. Therein lies the disconnect and it will worsen as there stimulation accelerates with the cultural manifestations of the technology in the future. That’s the problem. How do we address it? Future blogs will address this issue and whether all Net Geners are tech savvy.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

"Everything Is Boring!"

“School is boring. Everything is boring.” Ring a bell? You have probably heard the “b” word from your students and your own kids many times unless you have been living in a snow globe. Who hasn’t? UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute has conducted a national survey of nearly 250,000 college freshman at more than 500 colleges and universities for the past 44 years. One of their findings is that 40+ % of the students report “they are frequently bored in class” (Pryor et al., 2009). Unless the content is on their radar screens, it’s likely to be rated “boring.” That percentage keeps climbing every year in the U.S.
Our students are not the only ones bored. A survey of 211 British university students indicated that 59% found lectures boring in at least half of their classes and 30% find most or all of their lectures boring (Mann & Robinson, 2009). The least boring methods were found in seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions, where students could interact and actively participate. The use of PowerPoint® slides was the most important factor contributing to boredom. This has prompted some educators to “teach naked,” that is, without any technology (Young, 2009). However, this “throw the baby out…” mentality doesn’t seem totally warranted.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

What Should We Name This Generation?

Educators, authors, and researchers have used a variety of terms to name this generation. In fact, it has become a rather contentious issue. The book titles alone reveal this variation, for example, Millennials, Generation Y, Trophy Kids, Net Generation, and Digital Natives, to cite just a few. This has produced considerable confusion among faculty and administrators and much debate over the most appropriate label. Here are nine proposed names or monikers and brief rationales:

1. Millennials: for the high school graduating class of 2000 as they entered the new millennium.
2. Generation Y: derived simply from the succession of one generation to the next—the demographic cohort following Gen Xers.
3. Echo Boomers: the Baby Boom has an echo and it’s even louder than the original; the offspring of the Boomers.
4. Net Generation: linked directly to the (Inter)net and the emerging digital technology of the 1990s with which this generation grew up.
5. Trophy Generation (or Trophy Kids): derived from competitive sports and the practice where no one loses and everyone receives a “trophy” (actually a certificate) for participating.
6. First Digitals: associated with the Digital Revolution during the 1990s; this generation is the first to grow up immersed in everything digital.
7. Digital Aboriginals: the aborigines’ view of the world that all things are connected; this generation’s behaviors are analyzed from an anthropological perspective.
8. Nexters: might be considered a slang version of Next Generation.
9. Digital Natives: “digital” is their native language; they are “native speakers” of the language of computers, video games, and the Internet and have spent their entire lives surrounded by computers, cell phones, and all the gadgetry of the digital age.

After this review of names, the one name that seems the simplest, most descriptive, least controversial, and easily understood, and reflects the profound influence of the Internet on these students’ lives is: Net Generation or Net Geners. I will use that term in future blogs.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

Defining the Net Generation by Birth Date

Although the birth dates used to define this generation have varied in different surveys, there seems to be some agreement in the literature—typically between 1982 and 2003 (standard error of ± 2years). Those students are now 6 to 27 years old. That translates educationally into 1st grade through graduate school. However, some authors have lumped them into much narrower (1978–1984) and wider ranges (1976–2003), and everywhere in between.
The birth-date range affects estimates of the size of this generation. Current figures range from 80 to 90 million, about a 3rd of the U.S. population. It is the largest generation in history, even larger than the Baby Boomers. The eldest members have graduated college and are either entering graduate school and/or the workplace in droves. They are "flooding" the workplace, which has presented employers with a whole new set of issues to deal with 4 different generations, working side by side. Hummm. Those issues will be dealt with in a future blog.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

Can the Net Generation Be Clearly Defined?

Defining (by birth dates) and labeling any group of people and ascribing specific characteristics to them are fraught with problems of misrepresentation and generalization. Several researchers have proffered reasons and particular advantages to identifying this generation as well as others and their distinguishing characteristics. However, the concept of a clear-cut generation, cohort, population, or tribe has also been challenged. Despite the role of technology in their lives, they are infinitely more complex than any single profile can reveal. They comprise a fluid, messy, and diverse group, where a one-size-fits-all mold ignores their variability in skills, abilities, learning styles, experience, socio-economic levels, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Acknowledging those limitations, I still think there is legitimacy to suggesting a set of characteristics and cultural trends derived from sound scientific research that can guide future teaching practices for faculty.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC