Using Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge For Assignments

The ‘Mail Merge’ feature in Microsoft Word is designed to help people who are sending out massive mailings to individualize each letter.  For example, if you are sending out a letter to 250 customers, instead of saying “dear valued customer” as the opening, you can have 250 documents generated with “dear mr. smith” and “dear mr. jackson” and “dear ms. arnold” etc.  It is an incredibly powerful tool for administrative tasks, but more importantly, it can be used successfully in your classroom.  Here’s a short video explaining how to do it in excel 2007.

How is that useful in the classroom?  You can create multiple versions of the same assignment/project and use the mail merge to create individual assignments for each student.  For example, I recently completed a CSI project with my students where they were asked to use the physics topics we’ve been studying to solve a car accident mystery.

Each student received a packet with the crime scene information.  I used excel to randomly generate 80 different versions of the problem (check out this resource for using random numbers in excel).  The kids, of course, were amazed, and accused me (though I don’t think this is really an accusation) of being one of the biggest nerds alive.  We nerds are taking ownership of that term. What’s nice is that with Excel, I kept the random numbers and calculated all of the individual answers using excel formulas.  Each student was assigned a specific packet number (see image above) and I could use this number to look up their answers in Excel to check them when they were done.

Anyway, why the hell would anybody go through all of this trouble!?  Well, I’ve found there are a few reasons why this works for me.  First of all, showing students that you care about each one of them individually (even though I just used random numbers) always gets them to care more about the project.  Secondly, since each student has their own problem with their own answers, it forces them to ask me questions in a more general way, and to think things out more.  For example, a student can’t ask “what’s the convertible’s final velocity?”  because I don’t know the answer.  Instead they have to say, “I’m having trouble finding out what the convertible’s final velocity is.  How could I start?”  Which is a much more productive help request for the students to learn to solve problems on their own.  The most important advantage of doing this mail merge individualization is that it prevents cheating.  When I assign a big project like this, if all of the students have the same numbers, than anyone could just copy off of anyone else.  Thus, it would be difficult to allow the students to work together.  In this case, the students were encouraged to collaborate because help has to actually be help and not just copying.

I’d note that this isn’t specific to science and math, since excel can work with text instead of numbers.  In fact, in this most recent CSI project there was a line about whether or not it was raining the night of the accident which was different for different students.

Try it out, you might find it helpful and the students will appreciate it.  Here’s some additional resources on mail merges, and the actual CSI project that I assign with names changed because they are teachers from my school.

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION WORD DOC You can see what the project looks like with the mail merge fields in it. The packet is accompanied by a separate packet which scaffolds the students through a solution process.

Formatting Numbers – Word can sometimes act kind of funky when merging numbers and it can give you like pi*10^7 decimals when you want 1. This will help you to format the numbers after merging.