Problem: Wording the survey. Two members of the PTA committee in Exercises have proposed different questions to ask in seeking parents' opinions.
Question 1- Should elementary school-age children have to pass high-stakes tests in order to remain with their classmates?
Question 2- Should schools and students be held accountable for meeting yearly learning goals by testing students before they advance to the next grade?
a) Do you think responses to these two questions might differ? How? What kind of bias is this?
b) Propose a question with more neutral wording that might better assess parental opinion.
Exercises: Parent opinion, part 1. In a large city school system with 20 elementary schools, the school board is considering the adoption of a new policy that would require elementary students to pass a test in order to be promoted to the next grade. The PTA wants to find out whether parents agree with this plan. Listed below are some of the ideas proposed for gathering data. For each, indicate what kind of sampling strategy is involved and what (if any) biases might result.
a) Put a big ad in the newspaper asking people to log their opinions on the PTA Web site.
b) Randomly select one of the elementary schools and contact every parent by phone.
c) Send a survey home with every student, and ask parents to fill it out and return it the next day.
d) Randomly select 20 parents from each elementary school. Send them a survey, and follow up with a phone call if they do not return the survey within a week.