Taking Stock

I have realized that my interview questions and surveys are very limited for the sake of this project. I am trying to shape my project in a way that will produce valuable results. So, I ask each participant the same questions. After all, I have to interpret the data into measureable information. My goal is for my research to answer some, if not all, my initial questions, such as, how do students feel about writing, how do they feel about themselves as writers, do they think they can improve, what do they think good writing looks like, do they think writing is essential, what makes writing interesting for them, and what motivates their writing? On the other hand, the discussions that occur off record with participants are also very insightful and teach me things that I cannot articulate into measureable data. My day-to-day conversations with high school students, college students, professionals, and educators about writing are contributing to the teacher I will become. I still want to know more about how students process and produce writing so this project will easily continue into my career because there is not a simple answer that will conclude this journey.  

A new idea I have is to continue to collect data even after this project is over. If the information is not available then maybe I can help produce it. I truly believe in the topic I chose for this project. Another idea I want to explore is a suggestion made by Professor Collins, which is to record some of these conversations I have with students. The spontaneity of the responses will create an original and authentic piece of information that may not other wise be created if I simply ask students to write their answers. I value that piece of advice. I had the idea to do this early on and rejected it because it would not produce a measureable result but I like the idea of using it for consideration in my research.

As I wrap up my research I find myself in a place I did not imagine. I thought I would find multiple secondary sources that would shape how I conducted my project and my primary sources would provide supplemental information. It happened the other way around where I hardly found any valuable secondary sources and most of my information came from my primary sources. It leaves me with lots of information to reflect on, interpret, and to think how I will use this as a teacher.

Interpreting Information

I adopted a survey from a secondary source that includes an Attitude and Self-Efficacy Scale. There are 14 questions combined and the respondent rates each question on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). I have collected 20 responses so far and I calculated the average answer for each question. What I can say for sure about my participants is that they like to write, they rather write than do math problems, and they do not like to write poems. Of course, this information is insufficient and inconclusive in the grand scheme of things but for my iSearch project it is safe to say that at the very least these students like writing.

This survey does not tell me much else. It is nice to get a general sense of where these students stand on the spectrum of writing attitudes and self-efficacy but if I want to know more, I have to go deeper. I have created several questions for the interviews I want to conduct one-on-one, but because of 2nd trimester exhibitions and PARCC testing, I have to wait another week to direct the interviews. I don’t think I can interview the same 20 students that responded to my survey but if I aim for 5 of them I think that would provide an adequate sample of the group.

I decided that the questions for my one-on-one interviews will be open ended. This information will not be easy to tally up and average but that is ok with me. I debated between audio recording the interviews and having the students respond by writing. I settled on letting the students write their responses because their writing sample would be a bonus, which I previously mentioned. My next step is to reflect on the information I gathered from the surveys and interpret it into useful material for myself and other professionals. Also, conducting the interviews of course!

Update on my secondary sources

Searching for secondary sources is a journey. There is plenty of information on students to muddle through but what I am hoping to find is not what I come across too often. I want to find interview analyses, data on authentic responses, and survey results. I want the primary perspective via secondary sources, which is not readily available. This is not what scholars report. Maybe that’s the kind of information I can only get through my primary sources. The information I find more often is still useful because it provides me with a large, general sense of what researchers continue to focus on. There has to be a reason for the multiple studies on the same subject, such as the effect of gender on student attitudes. But if those studies result in inconclusive information, then why do researchers continue to explore it? Again, this still provides me with another researcher’s insight. There is evidence that researchers want to know what influences a student’s attitude towards writing. We just have different ideas about how to investigate the topic and what effects it.

I am pretty open minded about what effects a student’s attitude. And the way I want to investigate it is by going straight to the source – students. At least that’s where I want to start because I cannot gather data and formulate statistics without initial information. Some articles seem to begin with statistics and work the other way around. For example, beginning with standardized test scores and analyzing why those students did well. Or beginning with attendance records and predicting graduation rates. The student perspective is not explored as often as numbers are. The information does not include a student who explains why they did well on a standardized test or why they attend school every day. As I predicted, this information may not be easy to translate into perfect numbers. Open ended questions do not produce statistics. Another problem I am having with finding relevant secondary sources is that the research is not based on students in secondary schools. Lots of research concentrates on college aged students.

 On the other hand, I have an awesome secondary source that gave me a deeper understanding of how students feel about timed writing assignments. “Power, Resistance, and Literacy: Writing for Social Justice” by Julie A. Gorlewski includes excerpts from interviews she conducted with NY high school students. They talk about how they only practice, practice, practice for the writing portion of the standardized test in English class. It is very structured, timed, and boring. They are constantly doing one kind of writing in school, and even though some students write on their own outside of school for pleasure, they rate themselves according to the writing score they get on the standardized test. They don’t blame the teachers for the state requirements they must achieve because they are all just following the rules. Students wished they were asked to go deeper on the writing portion of the test instead of analyzing a quote from a book every single time. They want freedom, creativity, flexible formats, and original assignments. This source is definitely a gem.