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.    

Planning For My Primary Sources

My primary source for this project will be current high school students in Providence. They attend school in my district, the same one that served me as a high school student, so it will be interesting to compare the results to my personal experiences. I am not sure about how many students I will interview, though. I would assume the more, the better, but interpreting the data may result in insufficient information if I use open-ended questions.

I think by using open-ended questions, students will produce more genuine answers instead of choosing a suggested one. It will also provide me with a sample of actual student writing, which is a bonus. I wonder if their writing skills will coincide with their perspective on writing. I also came across an Attitude scale and a Self Efficacy scale when I was searching for secondary sources that I would like to incorporate into my interview. I think this will help produce more of a concrete result, even if my open-ended questions don’t.

My connection to these students is rather new. I assist in a classroom of ninth grade students so we met in September. We are pretty comfortable with each other so they will be my main pool of information. Other students in the building will also be my targets. I’ve been thinking of interviewing adults as well. Since I want to help nurture life long writers, I wonder what experiences adults have had with writing in school. I want to explore their attitudes towards writing and how high school may have impacted those feelings.

Creating interview questions is harder than I thought. There is so much I want to know that it’s hard trying to narrow my focus on select questions that will still provide me with the desired results. I’m also nervous because I don’t know if my relationship (or lack of relationship) to the student/adult will alter the results of my interviews. To get an idea of how to conduct the interviews, I will start slowly. I don’t want to do all my interviews in one day. I might learn something after a few interviews that will make me change how I handle it. Hopefully practice will make perfect.