East Hoelscher

Trenfield

Algebra II

May 12, 2017

Survey Report

In my TGPLAN group, we were researching and attempting to solve the issue of

poverty in education. Our thesis was that people in less well to do areas would have

access to a more limited array of learning materials. With the creation of our survey, we

were hoping to gauge the public concern towards our issue and to determine if there

was any correlation to a persons general demographic and their access to which types

of learning materials. We wanted to collect opinions primarily from both students and

their parents, as they are the ones directly impacted by this issue.

Distributing our survey proved quite difficult, however, and forced us to use a

convenience sampling technique. We strived to achieve a random sample by sending

our survey to friends who live in various parts of Austin, of Texas, and even of the US.

Additionally, two group members posted the survey link in neighborhood chats, which

resulted in a high proportion of responses from the Tarrytown and Circle C

neighborhoods.

As a group, we included several questions regarding demographics such as Are

you a child under 18 or are you the parent/guardian of a child under 18? and What
grade range are they (or you) in?. These questions would allow us to draw conclusions

based on age range and educational status compared to the learning materials desired

for success and available to students. Additionally, as a demographic question, we

asked respondents to provide their zip code as a method for us to determine their

relative affluency. As far as collecting raw factual data, we incorporated a variety of

question types to judge interest in particular items. For example, we used a rating scale

question to quantitatively judge the public opinion on how much poverty affects a

students education. For this we asked To what degree does poverty affect the success

of a student? and provided a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very strongly). We also

incorporated several checkbox question to allow respondents to tell us which types of

learning materials are available to them at school and at home, and to tell which

materials help them learn new topics the best.

With the 111 responses to our survey, I feel several definitive conclusions can be

drawn within the scope of our data. I initially was interested in focusing on the

respondents who feel textbooks are a useful method for learning, as they would likely

be the target audience for our library. I did this by comparing the number of people who

prefer to use a textbook for learning with the number of these people who have

textbooks available to them both at school and at home. Included below are pie charts

of my data:
This data helps me to conclude that if we were to bring books into neighborhoods,

students would have easier access to the learning method that they would benefit most

from. Additionally, to support this conclusion, I found that 63.6% of people who learn

well from textbooks would use a Little Free Library and another 30.9% said they might

use them. The following is a graphic of this data:

Lastly, I was interested at looking at one final question regarding prior knowledge of the

Little Free Library Group. I looked at the percentages of people who have or have not

heard of the Little Free Library Group out of the total number of people that ranked

poverty as very impactful or impactful. To my surprise, 79.2% of these people had

heard of a Little Free Library before that point. Here is a graph of responses:
From this, I was able to conclude that those who understand that poverty is an issue in

education would be more concerned with education (and the access to educational

materials) than their counterparts.

I feel our survey results strongly support the idea and mission behind the Little

Free Library we designed as a group. I feel that our survey was a very successful way

to judge the public interest in the libraries, which seemed to be extremely positive from

my analysis, and to prove the feasibility of the libraries as useful centers for learning.

Additionally, I felt that it was interesting to see how education value and social

awareness seem to be interconnected, though this data might not necessarily be useful

to our mission. Lastly, I feel that our survey results and analysis highlight the changes

that can be made to help families succeed in their childs educations. The results clearly

prove that if more Little Free Libraries were constructed, people would, in fact, use

them, and would most likely benefit from them.

Due to the nature of our survey, it is undeniable that there are inaccuracies and

shortcoming that do exist. Most likely, our survey method (being stratified) led to a lack

of variety in our data. This is due to the fact that the neighborhood chats that the survey

was sent to were both within neighborhoods in relatively affluent areas. This would have

led to an affluent biased result set and a lack of perspective on the issue. I also feel our

survey was slightly limited on questions that would have helped to connect the

educational material availability to demographic. Our plan was to determine a relative

demographic of the respondent from their zip code and use that within our analysis,

however, this proved to be much more difficult than intended and was not successful.
This is one thing I would change if the survey were to be redone. In a second poll,

however, I would still like to keep the questions regarding the poverty impact ranking

(on the 1-5 scale), as that gave us hard opinions in a quantitative delivery. Additionally, I

would keep the checkbox style responses for the learning methods, as they provided

leniency in possible responses and allowed for many layers of analysis to the data.