This was a site which we all agreed could be very useful. Because we were interested in making "formal" observations, we liked this walkable assessment . We found one on the web Site, Walk to School Day: Walking Resources . This provided us with a wonderful place to guide us in designing a tool for recording our own observations.
We spent one class period discussing the checklist and then modifying. We examined the original assessment as a group. The students gained a great deal from this discussion. There were a number of disagreements at first about which items should be included. Ultimately, the students decided it would be better to include most of the items on the original study. We also added one item! The class also decided to make their answers simple YES or NO. Click here to see what our assessment looked like.The students were given a week to complete to the survey. Then, I introduced the students to a spreadsheet document as a way to collate the information. Since my students had not used spreadsheets before, we did this as a group in our next lesson.