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!