Genre Shelving - The students have their final say

It's a busy term for everyone but I thought it was important to follow up with our students about how they are finding the new genre shelving.  I did an initial survey back in March and wanted to see how they felt now that they've been using books shelved by genre for a few terms.  Coincidentally, despite growth in the school there have been some bugs going around and I ended up with exactly the same amount of Year 5/6 students to survey. 

In order to make it quick and make it happen I reduced the survey to just two questions.  Here are the results, compared with the same questions asked in March, prior to shelving by genre:

1. Do you find it easy to choose a book to read?

What a big difference in the number of students who find it hard to choose a book to read.  From 17% in March to 4% in November.  A drop of 13%.  I'm very excited by this!  I love that changing the way the books are shelved made it easier for book selection - this is exactly what I'd hoped for.

2.  Do you think shelving books by genre has made it easier for you to find books to read?

I think this graph shows that our students' expectations of how genre shelving would help them have been met.  97% of our students think that shelving by genre has made it easier for them to find books to read.  Again I'm very happy with this.

The feedback I've had from teachers has also been overwhelmingly positive and I am so pleased that we changed to this way of shelving.  I blogged about some of the challenges earlier (and covered them in a presentation) but I still think these are far outweighed by the benefits.