Hey Everybody! This has been quite
the busy week for AP research. Although I find that the results that I have
been getting are quite interesting, this was definitely been the most tedious
week of research so far. During this week, I replayed and transcribed all of my
interviews, which roughly translated to 25-30,000 words worth of conversation.
In addition to all of this, I identified the seven themes present in these
conversations, and am finishing up combing through all of my data to piece out
the parts that exemplify the themes I found. Let’s just say that I have spent a
lot of time staring at a computer!
Going
into greater depth, after looking through all of my data, the seven themes that
consistently appeared throughout were high quality teachers, high expectations,
a strong focus on academics, a strong support network, a motivation and desire
to be at school, a strong community, and autonomy. Now that I have identified
these themes, I need to figure out how I am going to organize all of this
information so that is succinct yet effective in conveying what I need. Here
are a few sources from within my field in which I intend to model my results
and discussion sections off of:
1.
Buddin, Richard, and
Ron Zimmer. 2005. Is Charter School Competition in California
Improving the Performance of Traditional Public Schools? Smith Richardson
Foundation.
a.
This source sought to
measure the effectiveness of charter schools. In the results and data analysis
sections, this source broke the sections up into the two types of analysis performed:
the survey analysis and the student achievement analysis. In the survey
analysis, this source provides tables that have statistics for the data
collected from the survey and then explains the results shown in the table. For
the student achievement in analysis, this source explained what factors were
used in the analysis and then explains the results gained from this analysis.
2.
Cucchiara, Maia. 2013. Marketing
Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban
Amenities. The University of Chicago.
a.
This study is an
educational ethnography done in the city of Philadelphia which focuses on the
increased school choice options that the city has been given in recent years.
For this study, the researcher became immersed in the community of a school through
observation of PTO meetings, participation in school events, and interviews
with key school figures. In this analysis, the researcher used multiple rounds
of inductive coding to develop themes and then patterns throughout the data. As
opposed to giving tables and figures for all of the data gathered, this study
only states what the key findings from this analysis were.
3.
Raymond, et al. 2013. National
Charter School Study. Stanford, California: Center for Research on
Education Outcomes (CREDO), Stanford University.
a.
This study was a large
school charter school study intended to gather as much data as possible about
the effectiveness of charter schools. Although the purpose of this study and my
study were different, they are both within the fields of charter school
education. Although this research was mostly quantitative in nature, I still believe
that the overall layout for the results section will be the same. In this
study, the data was often presented in either tables or graphs, and then
explained in greater depth in words. For my research, I foresee myself
formatting my results section similarly by indicating how frequently each theme
appeared in my data and in each different format.
Based upon the results sections
that I have read and how my data is currently formatted, I believe that the
best way to organize this section will be to separate it by method and then
explain how prominent and frequent each theme is according to the data gathered
from my different methods.
As you all can see, I still have a
lot of work that needs to be done. With that being said, until next week!
(660 Words)
Hey Brian! I think you have a good plan to outline your results section. Sectioning off into your various methods will be very clear for the reader. Are you going to organize your results chronologically, following the same way we did our methods? This would be the best way to do it I think. However, like in your studies, I think it is important that you have transitions between the each section's results and an overall conclusion tying all your smaller conclusions together. I think having graphs and tables would be the best way to present your data. Keeping the raw data to yourself and instead having tables with more general conclusions in paragraph form under would be concise and easy to understand. In terms of themes, are you going to start with the themes that are most prominent and frequent? Or start with the least and build up? Either way make sure you are connecting everything as you go along.
ReplyDeleteGreat job! It looks like you have a general idea of what you results section should like from those similar studies!
Hey Brian! Wow it sounds like you have done a lot of work, and I think the themes you reported are pretty solid. However, your results section to me sounds really vague. Even from your analysis of the other sources, I felt like it was not clear what they were doing and specifically what aspects you would use in your paper. Like what types of graphs are they using? What types of figures would you use? I think it is a good idea to separate it by method, but then how are you going to report the prominence? Is that done through qualitative or quantitative results? Will you give only certain conclusions or every stat? I think you have a lot of good information, but let's think of a clear way of organizing it!
ReplyDeleteHey Brian!
ReplyDeleteThe amount of work that you've done over the past few weeks is seriously impressive... I totally understand feeling a little overwhelmed by the work load, but I'm 100% confident that you've got this down. That being said, I do think that you need to build up your ideas relating to the details of your results section. You definitely have all of the data, you just need to come up with an organized, well structured way to put it all together. If you're trying to quantitatively show the prevalence of your themes, you can use a bar graph or something like that... Great job so far!
I think that you need to also consider how you're going to transition from method to method. You don't want to just treat all of the information as discrete little sections, as that will make it seem like you just did three different research projects. How do you intend on having the results from each part converse? Perhaps that's something that can be done in the discussion section, but it's definitely something I want you to start to consider.
ReplyDelete