From the open ended/written response questions on the surveys I gave to the students at my school I learned that 7/17 students who replied to the question "What is your favorite way to learn math?" preferred to learn math by working on the computer and 6/17 students preferred to learn math in small groups. These results would guide my choices throughout the rest of the Action Research. Also, three of the students in my 6th-7th grade class specified that if they could change one thing about math they would not use textbooks.
From the Likert scaled response questions on the survey it was clear that over 50% of the students in my 6th-7th grade math class did not enjoy math and most were ambivalent about the math lessons I had been teaching so far that year. Keep in mind that this survey was given in September of my first year at this school-only a few weeks of math lessons had been taught by me in my classroom at the time of the survey. The next steps in my research project were clear after looking closely at my surveys:
- I needed to run some statistics using SPSS to determine if there were any major differences in the Likert scaled response items based on groups including:
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Gender
- I needed to get more information; I needed to interview my students to probe deeper.
2 comments:
I am always blown away when I see the quantity and quality of your research. When you're some sort of famous researcher in the field of education, will you take me with you? =)
Thanks Katie, that's really nice of you. I was mostly just really afraid I wouldn't have a job at all this year, let alone the same grade level so I made sure to do a lot of research while I could. It was a good choice for me because now I'm in a totally different grade and my topic would not be appropriate for my current students at all. However, I wish I'd been writing this blog all last year. It seems a little dry when I'm writing because I'm not in the moment anymore-it already happened, you know what I mean? So, in some ways it's a disadvantage to have already collected all my data. In other ways it's wonderful!
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