Interactive classroom Internet sites such as Blackboard are now widely used in college courses. These Internet sites include options for a number of possible interactive technologies. Particularly, they are useful for disseminating information and communicating quickly and easily with individual students and the class as a whole. One feature that is generally underutilized on interactive classroom sites is the online survey option. This feature was developed for instructors to survey the class, yet it is generally used by instructors for course evaluation purposes.

In this article, I will describe how an online survey can be used to teach undergraduate Psychology of Women students how to conduct social science survey research related to the topics covered within their textbook. Specifically, I use online surveys in a large (N = 150) undergraduate Psychology of Women course to (a) survey male and female students about topics we will cover in class in order to provide lecture materials on how students' opinions differ from class readings, (b) demonstrate how to analyze results of simple quantitative items by gender, (c) demonstrate how to come up with themes for the answers of open-ended questions by gender, and (d) teach students how to write up survey information in a research paper. I should point out here that even instructors teaching much smaller classes (e.g., 15–20 students) can use this method, as long as there are enough students in class to make survey items meaningful (data could also be collected across classes when there are multiple sections of the same course).

This assignment has some additional benefits. Students in Psychology of Women courses often consider published research studies outdated, even if those studies were conducted just a few years ago. In contrast, the online surveys were conducted just weeks or months ago. Additionally, students have a tendency to believe that research described in their textbook is not true on their campus or of their peer group. Class surveys are thus particularly convincing because the sample consists entirely of their classmates. Finally, it is a rare opportunity to see how different people interpret the same data and to explain how these different realities are part of feminist pedagogy.