USING ACCESS IN THE SECONDARY CLASSROOM

ACTIVITY: CREATE AND MANAGE SURVEYS

 

Resources

·        Software: Microsoft Access®

 

 

Steps

1)       On a piece of paper, jot down answers to the following questions:

a)       What is your first name?

b)       What is your last name?

c)       What way do you learn best? (Choose only ONE of the answers listed here.)
  Listening      Watching      Reading     Doing      All of These    Other

d)       If you had a choice, would you rather take tests with pencil and paper or on a computer?

e)       Do you have access to a computer at home?

2)       Signal the instructor when finished. While you are waiting for others to finish, create a Survey folder inside your network home folder.

3)       Open Microsoft Access in order to create a database to manage survey responses. Create this new database by choosing New File and BLANK database. Name it SURVEY and save it to your network home folder.

4)       Choose to create a table with the Table Wizard.
 

5)       Choose the following fields from the Contacts sample table in the wizard and click the > button to add them. 
     FirstName
     LastName

6)       In the same way, choose the following field from the Tasks sample table: TaskDescription
This time we will rename the field to fit our survey: click the Rename button and type LearningStyle

7)       Continue in the same manner. Choose the following field from the Categories sample table: CategoryName. Then rename this field to TestChoice

8)       Finally, choose the following field from the Products sample table: Discontinued. Then rename this field to ComputerAtHome

9)        Click the Next button and name your table StudentSurvey. Choose Yes, set a primary key for me and then click the Next button.

10)    Choose Enter data into the table using a form the wizard creates for me and click the Finish button. This automatically creates a form which pops open.

11)    Type data into this form as the instructor reads off the results from each hard copy survey.

12)    When you have finished, Save the form as StudentSurveyForm and close it.

13)    Next create a QUERY to find out certain information from the survey. To begin with, let’s just do a general query to see the results of the survey.  Click on Queries in the left pane and choose Create query by using Wizard.

14)    It will ask which fields you want in your query. Choose all the fields by click the >> button in the window. Then click the Next button.

15)    Choose to have a Detail query. Then click the Next button.

16)    Give the query the title of StudentSurveyQuery and choose to Open the Query to view information. Then click the Finish button. Now you can peruse the results of the survey. When you’ve had a chance to look it over a little, save and close it.

17)    Next create another query using the wizard. This time choose only the First Name; Last Name; and LearningStyle fields. Title the query LearningStyleQuery and again choose to Open the Query to view information. Do a Sort Ascending on the LearningStyle column. How many people chose “All”? How many chose “Doing”?  Save and close the query.

18)    Create a Report so you can print out the information from this last query. Click on Reports in the left pane and choose to use the Report Wizard. When it asks which fields you want to enter, choose the LearningStyle Query from the Tables/Query box drop-down. Then select all of the fields by clicking the >> button.  Then click the Next button.

19)    In the Do you want to add any grouping fields window, just click Next.

20)    Choose to Sort By LearningStyle then click the Next button.

21)    Choose whatever layout you would prefer and click the Next button.

22)    Choose whatever style you would prefer and click the Next button.

23)    Choose (or type in) Learning Style Report for the title of the report. Then click Finish to take a look at the report. We could then print out the report if we wished.

 

 

As you can see, we could run lots of different queries to find out more about the results of this survey and we could easily create printed reports of about anything we choose. In addition, we could export data from the table or any of the queries to Excel and graph the data results.  Pretty powerful stuff, eh? How could you make use of this survey or one like it in your classroom?