Falling in love with reading can change a student’s life. Teachers know this, but they also know how difficult it is to keep students engaged and actively invested in reading. This is where a reading survey for middle school students comes in.
In this blog post, we’ll give you the steps for making a fun reading survey for middle school students that’ll help you gather important insights about your student’s reading habits and encourage the young readers in your class to reflect on what they enjoy. Ready to make reading fun again? Let’s get into it!
What must a reading survey include?
Reading surveys are designed to uncover information that’ll help instill reading habits in students. This can be done by including questions that offer insights about the various aspects of reading like:
- Reading history: What have they read, and how do they feel about it? This will also show you their current reading level.
- Reading preferences: Ask about genres, authors, and book types (e.g., graphic novels, fiction, non-fiction) your students enjoy.
- Reading frequency: Include questions about how often they read or would like to read outside school hours.
- Reading motivation: Ask what motivates them to read (e.g., enjoyment, school requirements, bonding with friends, or learning something new).
- Challenges to reading: Identify any barriers they face, such as lack of time, difficulty understanding plots, or not finding engaging content.
- Reading formats: Gauge their preferences for reading formats. Do they like hardcopy books, e-books, or audiobooks?
How to make a middle school student reading interest survey using Google Forms
When creating a reading interest survey for your students, Google Forms proves to be the best platform. This is because it’s easy to work with and most accessible to your students.
Step 1: Create a new Google Form
Navigate to Google Forms.
Click the ‘Blank form’ button to create a new form.
Title your survey and provide a friendly and helpful description for the students.
Step 2: Ask students about what they’ve read
The first question needs to be about what your students read last.
Edit the default question to gather information about the last book that your students read. Choose the short answer format for this question with the button next to the question field.
Step 3: Include questions about plot elements
Now, you’ll want to uncover more about why your students picked the book they chose and what they might have liked about it.
Click the ‘+’ button in the floating menu next to the form to add a new question.
Then, you can start adding questions about the plot elements. Choose the paragraph question format. Learn how to use open-ended questions in a survey. When you’re mainly including open-ended questions, it’s a good practice to weave in a few closed-ended questions in your survey. This makes it easy for your students to respond quickly.
Add a new question to gauge the general story preferences of your students. Knowing your student’s storyline preferences can help you decide which books to include in your reading lists.
Step 4: Ask students what they thought about their book
Next, you should gather your student’s responses to the book they finished. You can add new questions like:
- Why did your favorite part of the book stand out for you?
- Did any specific scenes or moments affect you emotionally?
- Were there any parts of the story you found confusing or hard to follow?
All these will be open-ended questions.
Step 5: Download their long-form responses for yourself
Now that your survey is complete, the final step is to download their responses, as you’ll be going through them individually. While you can convert form responses to PDF, this task is made even easier with an add-on called Form Publisher.
With this add-on, your student’s survey responses will automatically be converted to a PDF or Word Doc and stored in a location on your Drive so that you can go over them at your own convenience.
Ways to make reading surveys for middle schoolers more fun
A boring reading interest survey defeats its own purpose. It’s important to keep your students’s attention and interest. Therefore, a reading survey for middle schoolers has to be fun. Here are a few fun ways to keep your students engaged while they’re taking it.
Use humor, memes, GIFs, etc.
Yes, it’s a survey about reading, but that doesn’t mean you can’t include images, memes, and gifs to keep things interesting and break up the text monotony. Fun visuals or memes can lighten the mood and also make the survey feel less formal.
This helps students feel more connected to the survey, making it less of a chore and more of a fun activity. A lighthearted approach will also encourage honest answers, which is exactly what you’re after.
Focus on your students' interests
To make reading surveys more fun for middle schoolers, speak their language by focusing on their personal interests. For example, many students enjoy fantasy or superhero stories. Ask questions about the types of magical powers or heroes they’d want in a book.
When the survey is aligned with their interests, students will be more excited to participate and share their thoughts. This will help you gather more accurate and insightful responses about their reading preferences.
Go beyond what they’ve read
To keep reading surveys engaging, go beyond just asking what students have read. Explore their broader interests and how they relate to reading. You could also include questions about their favorite movies, video games, or even comics.
This lateral way of thinking about reading will encourage them to think creatively about books they haven’t tried reading yet. Also, if you can tap into their imagination with your survey, you’re more likely to discover what would genuinely captivate your students.
Form Publisher can help you better organize open-ended responses
Once you’ve gathered your student’s unfiltered responses, you can analyze them and finally make a breakthrough by creating a reading habit. To really read each and every response complete with the minute details, you’ll need to organize those responses, and you have Form Publisher for that.
Download each response as a separate document, make notes on it, highlight it for future reference, and do whatever you want with documents. Form Publisher is committed to making teachers’ and educators' lives easier!