Fin

We’re finally done! After nine months of reading, researching, writing, developing, editing, and preparing, we all made it through this difficult yet rewarding process (even if there were times in which we thought that we wouldn’t). The last two years in this AP Capstone program have truly been a transformative process which helped so much in developing my ability to critically think, analyze, and organize, as well as for more importantly proving to myself what I can accomplish.

When I first began in AP Seminar two years ago, I struggled with the workload and the expectations that were set for me. Although I had experience writing papers, I had never attempted to do anything remotely close to what a seminar paper was. I had difficulty managing my time when given large assignments in that class, and so I think the quality of my work suffered as a result. As the year progressed though, I think I adapted to the class and learned from my mistakes so that towards the end of the year, I did not have as much difficulty as before. I learned to really take advantage of the assignments we did early in the project process, such as the annotated bibs, and outlines, because I found out how much easier writing a paper was when I had that information. Also, as the year progressed, I think that I also developed the critical thinking and organizational skills that made assignments a lot easier as well. That being said, I struggled throughout the year with the amount of work that was required. Although part of it was my fault, I remember times feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with the class, considering everything else that is going on junior year.

Although I was hesitant about taking AP Research, after the difficulty I had in AP Seminar, I am ultimately glad that I chose to take the class, and am so proud of what I was able to accomplish as a result. While a lot of Seminar was spent in frustration as I tried to adapt to the class, I think that Research was a lot more enjoyable, even if it required more work. The class was certainly stressful at times, especially when big deadlines were approaching, but I think that the freedom I was given to choose my topic really made everything worthwhile. Being that BASIS has been a huge part of my life for the last 8 years, not only did I maintain my interest throughout the entire process, but I feel like this project was almost retribution to all of the positive things that BASIS has done for me. Even though BASIS has its flaws (which I made sure to point out in front of the CEO), I think that it created and molded the most capable, competent version of myself. There were many late nights, lots of caffeine, and maybe a couple tears along the way, but I feel as if my project was an appropriate conclusion to my time at this school. Even though I will have bittersweet memories (and maybe nightmares) about this place, there is no denying the BASIS effect, and how it turned a nerdy little kid with a bad haircut and glasses into a college-bound young adult capable of conducting meaningful, independent research.

As I reflect back on AP Capstone, and my time at BASIS as a whole, I acknowledge the opportunities I was given. Despite the negativity I may have felt, this is my ode to Seminar, Research, and BASIS as a whole. It has been a challenging, frustrating experience, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I hope you all enjoyed my journey through AP Research. Signing off for the last time, this is Brian.

(621 Words)

Reorganize, Review, and Rehearse

Hey everybody! Its hard to believe that our presentations are less than a week away. This is pretty terrifying to know that we only have five days until we deliver our final presentations on everything we have done so far this year. I think that the time has gone by so fast, and it is hard to believe that we are here.

              Anyways, moving onto today’s topic. After presenting last Monday, and then again on Saturday, I can say that my presentation was by all accounts rough. On my presentation Monday, I did not have enough slides, and so there were gaps of time where I was talking, but I did not have a slide to accompany the claim I was making. Because of this, my script and slides were pretty disjointed. Over the course of the week, I dedicated my time adding more slides, and improving the quality of the ones I already had so that they better followed what I was talking about. In addition to that though, I also tried adding more evidence to strengthen the claims I was making regarding my themes.

              However, after presenting again yesterday, the teachers I presented for noted how significant work was still needed. As they pointed out, I still had problems with both my slides and script. In terms of my script, the literature review needed to be reorganized, I needed to better explain my methods, and I need to cut down on my explanations of the themes I found. For the slides, even though I had more, some of the slides were either very generic, or they looked good, but the background image was only vaguely related to my topic of charter schools.

              Since I met with them yesterday, I rewrote my literature review section of my script so that it follows the order that they suggested. I think that it makes a lot more sense now, and so I feel better about that section. Currently, I am working on finishing up editing the rest of my script so that it reflects the suggestions that the teachers made. I plan on finishing that tonight, and then editing my slides tomorrow, so that the rest of the week can be dedicated to practicing my presentation.

              For my practice presentations, I had problems with the content in my script, the visuals in slides, and the memorization of the script. On a positive note, though, I don’t think that I had any weird mannerisms, or spoke too quickly or quietly. Anyways, I know that I still have a lot of work to do, but I am confident that I will be able to get it all done and deliver a well-rehearsed presentation!

Until next week! (for my final post :/)

(458 words)

Presentation Preparation

Hey Everybody! It is hard to believe that we are less than two weeks away from our final presentations. After submitting my paper to Mrs. Haag, I must say that I am so proud of what I, and everybody else, was able to do over the course of this year. It’s so hard to believe that it is almost done, especially considering how hard we have all worked. However, that being said, we still have our presentations to rehearse and deliver.

              Over this past week, I made a lot of changes to my script and slides. Coming into this week, my script needed to be cut down some, and made more cohesive, and my slides needed to be beefed up quite a bit. As a result, I spent some time making my script flow and transition better, and added quite a bit to my slides. That being said, I still do not think that my presentation is perfect. In my head, I envision an ideal presentation being one that engagingly and effectively conveys your information to your audience. It should keep them interested, and make them want to learn more about what you are talking about. To do this, the main focus of a successful presentation should be on what is said, and not what is on the powerpoint. The powerpoint should be a supplement to what is being said, and should not be the backbone of the presentation.

              When I look at my presentation, I am still left not feeling very confident about my discussion of my themes. This is the central part of entire research project, and so I need to be able to convey what I found with these themes in a concise and effective manner. However, because there is so much to talk about with them, I feel like I go too far in depth, instead of talking about only what I need to. Also, I feel like my slides still might be a little bit too bland. I tried make them more interesting by animating my bullet points and including figures to illustrate what I am talking about; however, I still feel like it is a little lackluster.

              Anyways, moving onto my “memorization strategies.” Now that my paper is pretty much finished, perfecting my presentation is going to be my main priority. Truthfully, I don’t plan on using any specific strategies other than just practicing my presentation a lot. In the past, with my seminar presentations, I remember reciting my presentation in the mirror, and that worked then, so I foresee myself doing that as well.

              Until next week!

              (433 words)

Time for the Show

Hey Everybody! We are only a couple weeks away from being done with our entire projects! This has been such long but rewarding process, and I am so proud of what everyone has accomplished. I have made a lot of progress in the past week as I reorganized most of results and discussion section. Also, I got a lot of good feedback, created my presentation, and wrote my script. Needless to say, I have been pretty busy!

            As I worked on my script, I noticed that my main problem was that I had trouble cutting my script down. Since we only have 15 minutes to deliver our presentation, I did the math and figured out that my script should be just over 2000 words to fit it all in the time. In order to do this, I had to cut out a lot evidence and information to make the cut. Additionally, I completely removed the section where I provided my qualitative analysis of each theme. This is one of the points that I would like to ask my group members about because I feel like I had a lot of my nuance and understanding in this section, but I thought that it would take too much time to go through each of my seven themes one by one. My plan right now is just to talk about what themes I identified, and then provide the quantitative analysis to prove that they were present from my thematic analysis. From there, I was just planning to then move onto my discussion to provide my analysis. What do you guys think about this plan?

            Anyways, moving onto the rubric. I think that I do a solid job for row 1 with articulating my question, method, and conclusion. Row 2, as I just mentioned, I think might be a problem. I think that I still clearly demonstrate what data I gathered and prove that it is valid, and then tie it to my conclusions, but I feel like I am kind of missing the essence of my project without these qualitative results. This is something that I am going to have to work on further to figure out if maybe I can incorporate them in a more concise way. I think that I do a decent job with row 3 describing how my thought processes have changed in my conclusion, however, I may need to add a little bit more to this part because I think some of this may have been unintentionally cut. Lastly, for row 4, I think that my presentation might need some more work. The problem with my presentation is that it is hard to add visual aids to what I am talking about, besides the graphs in my results section.

Anyways, I look forward to seeing everybody else’s presentations and scripts this week. Until next week!

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Peer Review Round 2

Hey everybody! I cannot believe that we are less than a month away from being done with AP research. Although I am freaking out a little bit about how close the deadline is, I am excited about how far we have come, and so I think that research will be a nice culmination of everything we have done at BASIS!

              Anyways, this past week has been dedicated to me cutting down my research paper to make it more concise, logical, and easy to read. At the beginning of this week, I was at 7200 words, and now I am at about 5400 words. My literature review, methods, and results combined are about 3700 words, and I am in the process of reorganizing and rewriting my discussion. As I read the peer comments while editing my paper, I realized how verbose I was in my writing, and how much confusion this caused. Additionally, because I am so masterful at saying nothing with a lot of words, this prevented me from being able to include explanations that were necessary to my research. Besides the wordiness though, I also realized that I did not use enough sources after my literature review. When I was writing, I think that I thought that I did not need to include sources because ethnographies generally do not have as structured of a research process as other methods. This week, however, I realized that this assumption was wrong, and so more sources are needed.

              Moving onto next week, my main focus for my paper is now on making sure that my explanations are thorough and clear, that my claims are well-substantiated, and that my discussion is concise and logical. With that being said, for the peer-editing this week, I would like my peers to focus on the clarity of my explanations and the quality of my evidence. Additionally, because my discussion was so diluted with repetition and wordiness, I think that it is the weakest part of my paper right now. For this section, I would also like to ask my peers to comment on how this section flows, as well as for the quality of the conclusions I make.

              Changing gears now, the other task for this week is on writing the script and creating the powerpoint. For my presentation, I feel really confident about the literature, my understanding of the school, and the insight I gained. For the oral defense, I think that these are all topics that I could defend well. What I am the most uncertain about are the methods I used to conduct my thematic and observational analyses, because these are qualitative analyses first of all. More than that though, ethnography is a pretty subjective type of study that does not have strict guidelines that need to be followed, and so it is hard to justify what I did. Ethnographies are based a lot on intuition and researcher perceptions of the data, and so while there may be ways to methodically go through the data, the understanding gained really depends on the researcher. When writing my script, this is a topic that I am going to have to pay careful attention to how I convey the information.

              Anyways, that’s all for this week! I look forward to reading my group’s papers and am excited to receive some feedback as well. Until next week!

(560 words)

I Feel Complete...Almost

Hey everybody! I cannot believe that I finally have a complete draft of my paper. Although it still needs quite a bit of love, attention, and editing, I am so proud of how far I have come, just as I am sure that many of you are as well. We have been working on our projects for close to eight months now, and so it is so rewarding to finally have something tangible to show for all of the work that has been done. While I can see the finish line approaching, I know that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, and so I know that I need to continue working hard to push through the last month of research.

              Knowing that editing my paper is now the next step in this process, I am going to talk about what I see as the good and bad with my paper. To begin, I am going to start on a more positive note by addressing the parts of my paper that I feel are the strongest. First of all, I believe that my literature review provides a solid foundation for my paper. I spent a lot of time meticulously planning, writing, and editing this part of my paper, and, as a result, I believe that I do a good job in explaining the significance of my research, and articulating where the gap is. Additionally, in my discussion, I think that I also do a good job in articulating why I got the results that I did, and how this differs from what was expected.

              Now, moving onto the bad. When I think of the flaws in my paper, the most glaring issue is my word count. Right now, I am at approximately 7200 words, and so I need to cut over 2000 words. Throughout this process, I have known that the word count was going to be an issue, because of the qualitative nature of my research, and the use of multiple methods to collect my data. Despite this, though, my thought process has been to write what I think is necessary, and then go back and cut what ends up being unimportant. With this being said, though, I did not think that I would be this far above the word count. Fortunately, though, I know that concision is something that I frequently struggle with in my writing, and so, I am sure that a lot of words can be cut out if I spend the time to go through the paper and cut unnecessary words.

              Despite the high word count, I still do not feel very confident about my results section. Even though I feel like I was deliberate and thoughtful regarding what I included in my results section, I feel uncertain about how I went about the qualitative analysis by discussing what I found with each theme individually. I think that this approach may have used up more words then what was needed, and so I have been trying to think of a more concise way of including everything.

              Anyways, so for the people who will be reading my paper this week, if you guys could focus on finding parts of my paper to cut, then that would be really appreciated! Thanks!

Until next week!

(552 words)

Time to Discuss

Hey everybody! So we are another week closer to having our final papers completed! Over this past week, I have been working on organizing all of my analysis to create and write my results section. After concluding my analysis, I found seven major themes among my interview and survey data that really explain why the school I am studying is the way it is. These themes are high expectations, quality teachers, a focus on academics, a strong support network, a motivation to be at school, a strong community, and teacher autonomy. Although finding the themes was not very difficult, it was challenging to figure out how to incorporate my observation data into my results, since my surveys and interviews focused on the school as a whole, whereas my observations did not. Eventually though, after I did some research, I was able to find the characteristics that are indicative of good teaching, and so I was able to use those to code my observations.

Anyways, going into this week, I know that my discussion section is going to be difficult to write. Although I am a little bit worried about how I am going to be organizing everything, I am more worried about figuring out what to include or omit, because there is so much to talk about. First and foremost, I need to answer my research question. In my results, I provide a summary of what I found with each theme, but now I need to explicitly state what specifically works to make a charter school successful. Although the straightforward answer would be to just say that other schools should do whatever this school is doing, it unfortunately is not that simple. This is because charter schools are ultimately schools of choice, and so an educational model for one school might not necessarily transfer well to another. In addition to this though, there are some far more fundamental questions that should be approached, such as whether the measure of success I used in this study, which was based off of grades and test scores, is even an accurate measure of success. Also, I need to explain why my results were what they were, where the error in my research was, and what future fields of research could be. Anyways, I am going to stop ranting now, and instead I am going to talk about some discussions that I have read that are related to my paper.

1.   Bortree, Denise Sevick. 2005. Presentation of Self on the Web: an ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs. Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida.

      Although the content of this research does not relate to what I am doing, it is also an unconventional ethnography in that it seeks to understand a community not traditionally studied in this type of research. This study sought to understand how teenage girls interrelate with one another through blogs, just as I am trying to understand how the different parts of a charter school come together to create a high achieving community. I chose this study because this ethnography did a good job being concise in its overall analysis and conclusion. This paper was also qualitative in nature, and so the discussion section was spent really tying together the different components of the community. In this section, it started with the smaller components and become more and more broad, which is something that I need to do, because I have many moving pieces in my research.

2.   Raymond, et al. 2013. National Charter School Study. Stanford, California: Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Stanford University.

      This study did a good job in laying out and explaining the implications of their research. It sought to determine if charter schools are successful or not, and so the discussion focused on laying out a few key points at the end, and then it explained those in greater depth. I think that this may be an effective way for me to organize everything at the end, because there are a lot of implications involved in my research, and so explicitly stating and then discussing them may be useful.

3.   Buddin, Richard, and Ron Zimmer. 2005. Is Charter School Competition in California Improving the Performance of Traditional Public Schools? Smith Richardson Foundation

      What was useful about this study is that in the conclusion, it tied the purpose of the study with the results that were found to show to what extent their research was able to answer their question. In their conclusion, they acknowledge how other literature has mixed results regarding the same question being asked, but they tried to explain the inconsistencies. Although there is not any research that has tried to answer the exact same question, there are a couple sources that I have that postulate what makes a school successful, and so what they thought is something that I should address and comment on.

Anyways, I have a lot of work ahead of me this week, but I am looking forward to having a finished product soon. Sorry about such a long post. Until next week!

(846 words)