COPPA woes- 13 to use the internet

January 21, 2020 11:19 PM

I'm a teacher of Year 7 (ages 11-14, generally 12-13). There's a character strengths survey we'd like to use, however, this is age restricted, and most of our students are under 13!

The tool we'd like to use is the VIA character strengths survey, and when the curriculum says we do this, most of our kids are under 13. It's awkward when you're rolling through the lesson and you have to make a decision about canning the lesson or getting them to lie about their age, and I'd like to avoid this problem this year.

Purpose: we have to do a 'careers lite' kind of unit, to help the kids think about what kind of person they are and where their interests lie. (Serious career exploration is saved for a more age appropriate time in a few years.) It's a new unit, so open for making improvements.

I am open to finding a new and better survey- the via survey is a bit long.
I am open to setting up adult accounts and having the students use that (VIA has a system where you can take the youth survey through and adult account but the model is more parent/child rather than teacher/student), but I think this means students could see each other's results, which I don't like.

Is it worth rolling our own survey? (Seems like a lot of work with little payoff)

I can't change the unit nor when we do it. (*solemn tone* the government has spoken and so has the school *solemn tone* )

Thank you!

posted by freethefeet to Education (9 answers total)

→ the government has spoken and so has the school

So what's the government and school's suggestion? They put you in this situation, you can't circumvent it.
posted by scruss at 4:24 AM on January 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

Looks like VIA has a VIA Youth product, for a price, $10, for ages 10-17. They also have a 17 page sample pdf.
https://www.viacharacter.org/profile-reports/via-youth-profile-report
posted by at at 5:37 AM on January 22, 2020

My (vaguely recollected) memory of COPPA was not that it barred collecting information from/about those under 13, but that it required explicitly-sought parental permission to do so. Can you get parents to sign a form allowing their kids' use of the software?

Is your problem compliance with the law, or compliance with a checkbox/CYA line on the software that says uses have to be over 13? That's a distinct question from your compliance with COPPA (and FERPA)--it's more of a way for the software company to say *they're* not getting kids' data without parental permission.
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:12 AM on January 22, 2020

There are offline, printable Career Aptitude tests, like RIASEC Can you substitute a printable test that you can handle completely in-house?
posted by jacquilynne at 6:54 AM on January 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Hahaha scruss. Thanks for the giggle.

The issue is that I don't want to tell the kids to lie about their age, rather than complying with COPPA, strictly.

Oh I also should have mentioned that the budget is 0.

Interesting idea jacquilyne, will investigate further.
posted by freethefeet at 1:52 PM on January 22, 2020

I would make multiple adult accounts and give one to each kid under 13, but you will need to have a unique email address for each one. The second checkbox at the bottom of the form says, "An adult is present..." and that will be true.
posted by soelo at 2:24 PM on January 22, 2020

For the unique email requirement, many email providers (I know GMail and I think Outlook.com do, at least) allow you to add a "+whatever" tag to your email address (e.g. if you have "[e-mail]" for each account you could use "[e-mail]", "[e-mail]", etc.), which you might be able to use to trick it into thinking you're using multiple different email addresses instead of just one. It doesn't always work, as sometimes email validators reject "+" characters in email addresses, but it's worth a shot assuming you're okay with soelo's workaround.
posted by Aleyn at 6:08 PM on January 22, 2020

Y'know, some Javascript web type person could whip that RIASEC test up into a single page stand-alone HTML file that asked 42 yes/no questions and then displayed the selected three sections...

Also, is there a big deal with internet accessibility? Could you just have the under 13 do the VIA at home or the library with their parental unit and bring in the result?
posted by zengargoyle at 6:54 PM on January 22, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks all- we went with "eh we'll skip it this year" and they'll do the survey in Year 8, when they are 13.
posted by freethefeet at 1:39 PM on February 28, 2020