WebQuests (ICT Integration)

What Does the Future Hold?

What do you feel about the future of South Africa? Do you think everyone feels the same way about this? Do you think that young people feel more positive than older people? Do office workers feel more positive than manual labourers?
What makes people feel positive about the future?

Task

You are a member of a research team that has been contracted to find out how communities feel about South Africa’s future. Your research findings will be posted on a prominent South African information website.

The question that you should answer on this series of related web pages is: Do all South Africans feel positive about the future of this country?

Process

Your team will need to develop questionnaires and then interview members of the community using these questionnaires. It is your responsibility to interview a broad range of people in your community including children, elders, community officials, health workers, teachers and so on. The information that you collect will need to be analysed. Your conclusions will be written up as a report on the website, supported by charts.

Your team must accomplish the following tasks to complete this assignment:

Develop a list of questions for use on a questionnaire and in interviews.
Interview a range of community members in order to get as many responses as possible.
Analyse your data to establish what your findings represent.
Use Excel to compare and correlate your findings with those of others in your team.
Write up a report in which you share your findings.

For this assignment, you will work in teams of four and you will divide your task into roles as follows (click on each role for more information):

Community Researcher 1

Your task is to conduct research in the community either in person or by telephone - there are two of you in the team. First your team needs to discuss the strategy: who is going to be included in the survey and what specific questions are going to be asked. Create and use a survey sheet. Once you have concluded your survey, provide the data to the research analyst. Participate in the team discussion once the data has been entered in a spreadsheet and analysed. What are your team's conclusions?

Community Researcher 2

Research Analyst

Your task is to analyse the research data once the surveys have been completed. First you should participate in the team discussion of the question and what your research strategy will be. Help to formulate good survey questions. Once the survey data has been received enter the data in a spreadsheet and analyse the data: sort it, count responses and draw charts. Present your spreadsheets and charts to your team and discuss the findings. As a team you should draw conclusions in answering the question.

Writer

Your task is to write up the finding and conclusions of your team's research and analysis. You should write this information for a web page and include charts and tables to support your team's conclusions. In your web page articles you should

pose the question
describe your research strategy
report on your teams findings with tables and charts
conclude by answering the question

You should participate in the initial team discussion and design of a survey. After the data has been analysed and presented you should participate in drawing the conclusions as a team.

Resource

» http://www.statpac.com/surveys/
This Web site has a free tutorial on how to develop questions and design questionnaires. Look closely at Questionnaire design, Order of questions, Qualities of a good question and Question wording.

Conclusion

By completing this activity you and your team should have gained a good insight into the opinions of different sectors of society about the future of South Africa. Did the findings surprise you?

» Download the Presentation Assessment

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