Rating, Card Sorting, and Focus Groups
Rating, Card Sorting, and Focus Groups
Item rating
Children judge the quality of environmental features that matter to them, alone or as a group.
Card sorting
Sort cards from best to worst using markers or stickers; rank, number, or list with arrows. The middle is the average worth moving up.
Focus group
Five or six children (up to eight or ten) discussing one issue for 30 to 40 minutes. The teacher keeps them on task but does not take over.
Grouping rule
Meet separate groups by age or gender so no one voice dominates.
The methods here have one job: to pull out what children actually think about their surroundings and turn that judgment into something a school or community can act on. Children notice more than adults credit them for, and these tools give their opinions a shape.
Rating What Matters to Children
In item rating, children make clear judgments about the quality of environmental features that matter to them, working alone or as a group. Sent out into the grounds, the fields, or the surrounding area, they gather information on things like the quality of garbage disposal and collection, the water, the drainage, and the sanitation. Most children are glad to do this fieldwork.
The judgments then sort into two piles: what is good and what is not. The good things need to be sustained, because anything left unattended tends to slide. The rest needs fixing. The useful move is to let the children say what should be done in each case rather than handing them the answer.
A class rates the sanitation, drainage, and water quality around their school and finds the drainage is good but the garbage collection is poor.
What is the sound next step?
Rating puts a number or a level on a feeling, which is what makes it possible to compare, argue, and prioritize.
Card Sorting and Ranking
Card sorting is a hands-on way to turn those judgments into an order. Children write features onto cards and then arrange them, using markers or stickers, from very good to good to poor to unacceptable. The cards can be numbered, ranked, and reshuffled as opinions change.
The same idea works with only paper and pencil: list the features, then draw arrows to place them first, third, fifth, and so on, from best to worst. Somewhere in the middle sits the average, the thing that is neither good nor bad but merely acceptable. The interesting question is direction. Which way should that middle move, and what would it take to push it up rather than let it drift down?
Sorting also makes disagreement visible. When two children place the same card in different spots, the gap between them is the start of a conversation.
Rank features in order, from best to worst.
Using cards with markers or stickers, or a simple list with arrows, children place each feature in order. The middle rank is the average, and the group can decide which direction to move it.
Running a Focus Group with Children
A focus group is simply five or six children, no more than eight or ten, brought together to discuss one issue for a set time, usually 30 to 40 minutes. Keep it short; a group held for hours only bores everyone. The topic stays fixed, whether it is climate change, disaster risk, or sustainability, and these are issues that touch the children’s own future.
Many teachers avoid focus groups because they assume children cannot discuss serious issues. In practice children can stay more focused than many adults do. The teacher’s job is to keep the group on task and concentrating, not to run the discussion. Once an adult takes over, the children stop being the source of ideas and the method fails at its one purpose: to hear them.
A teacher runs a focus group on local flooding, but each time a child pauses she jumps in with her own explanation and moves on.
What has gone wrong?
The point is to end with recommendations the children reached themselves, because those are the ones they will care about carrying out.
Keeping Groups Balanced
How a focus group is composed shapes who gets heard. It is often more effective to meet separately with different groups rather than mixing everyone. Running a group of all girls, or all boys, or one age band at a time keeps a single kind of voice from dominating. A mixed group is fine when it is needed, but pairing very different ages backfires: put Grade 5 and Grade 10 children together and the older ones tend to take over while the younger ones fall silent.
To stop a single kind of voice from dominating.
Older children can talk over younger ones, and one gender may crowd out the other. Separate groups, such as all one age band or all one gender, give quieter members room to speak and recommend.
Balanced groups do not just feel fairer; they produce better information, because the children who would otherwise stay quiet are the ones with something new to add.
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