So, why use SurveyMonkey in the history classroom? Teachers can use surveys not only to gauge student learning, but also to walk students through how to ask questions. Understanding how historians pose questions is an essential skill in the social studies classroom; teachers can use Survey Monkey to help students understand cognitive levels of thinking and questioning (from fact recall to analytical or evaluative). If teachers model how to construct thoughtful surveys that will yield useful results, students are one step closer to answering their own questions with well-designed data collection tools.

Using SurveyMonkey as an instructional tool is a great way to engage students in curriculum development. In this example, a teacher instructs her students to construct a survey on immigration. In the comments section, you can browse through the student-created surveys to see some examples. Unfortunately, most online examples are not produced by students. Most teacher-produced surveys tend to ask students to assess their teacher's instruction or are geared towards colleagues in the field of teaching. Hopefully, as survey-building tools become more commonplace, more student-produced surveys will appear online. On a final note, teachers should be aware that learning how to construct surveys is a valuable lesson for students, but learning how to construct questions that yield valuable data is even more important . . . but not easy. Wording of questions, understanding the target audience, and minimizing bias are all concerns students should be thinking about in constructing poll questions. But introducing students to these challenges can help them begin to understand why historians must think about these concerns in the process of analyzing historical events. One Teacher's Experience: Bridget Federspiel, Teachinghistory.org Teacher Representative I have used SurveyMonkey for numerous projects. While completing a Teaching American History (TAH) grant proposal, I needed to collect information about the education background and professional development activities of my colleagues. I created a 10-question survey and sent the link in an email. My students have used SurveyMonkey to collect data for use in a National History Day project. The students created a survey and posted the link on their Facebook page. First the students made a list of questions for their survey. They wanted to gather information about how often students use particular Internet sites for research. The students created 10 multiple-choice questions for their survey. (Multiple-choice questions worked best due to the fact that it didn’t take too much time for people to answer the questions.) The questions ranged from the vague (how often do you use the Internet for research?) to the specific (how often have you used the Library of Congress site to search for information?). Each student then linked to the survey on their Facebook page, asking their friends to answer the survey. The students collected over 500 hits on their survey. SurveyMonkey tallied the answers for them, and the students used the information to create graphs of their results, indicating the most popular Internet sites used by the students.