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)
Hey Brian!
ReplyDeleteI loved reading your paper! I think that you did a great job explaining your claims to the reader, in that they made sense and were substantiated well with evidence. However, I would be sure to use more academic and professional diction, as well as vary your syntax and sentence structure more. Because of this, your paper, although it had interesting points, appeared to be very monotonous.
In your Literature Review, I pointed out some places where you could change the order in which the claims are presented. By explaining some topics before others (even if it's only a sentence), your reader will be able to follow your argument more clearly. For example, you could first justify that the sociological and political purposes of education can be examined together before delving into why doing so would provide a more complex perspective on the education system. This will in turn allow for more clear transitions between your various subtopics. Additionally, you use some ambiguous terms that could have more specific definitions in order for the reader to understand your paper better. I would also lean back on the "it is known" and "it is clear" usage in your paper, since this just requires more words.
Regarding your Methods section, I would suggest first explaining the purpose of your research and the fact that, to answer your research question, you need to analyze social interactions, behaviors, etc. Then, I would go into detail about what an ethnography is and why it's necessary in your own study in order to best answer your research question. I would additionally explain the various parts of an ethnography briefly before you go into detail about how you used each part. I feel that you need to justify and explain what interviews, observational studies, and surveys individually contribute to an ethnography, and then tie in how these will be valuable in answering your own research question. I would also attach both the teacher survey and the interview questions in an Appendix A and an Appendix B, respectively, since these are necessary in order for someone to fully replicate your research.
Regarding your Results section, I think that you did a really great job explaining to your reader how you organized your data with you various figures. You had great visual aids which really clearly communicated your findings. You also had good conclusions, since they were just general enough to be in the Results section, and they set you up perfectly for a conversation between all of them in the Discussion section. However, I would suggest placing an explanation of what a thematic analysis and what an observational analysis is in your Methods section, rather than your Results section, since you first need to justify to the reader why they are necessary for an ethnography before explaining how you used them. Additionally, how did you identify the various themes in your data in your thematic analysis? Did you find key words or trends? Remember that the replication of your study is important, so be as specific as you can.
In your Discussion, you addressed your limitations well. Regarding your concerns about your claims made, I was able to follow your conclusions and line of reasoning easily, other than a few claims which I think were missing the links between them (I pointed these out in my comments on your paper). Furthermore, I would just make sure to frequently relate back to your own question, since you tend to go off on tangents in your discussion. Also, a lot of your conclusions have to do with the students, themselves, and their perspectives. I would justify that the teachers can accurately represent the thoughts of students at the school before using their evidence to draw your particular conclusions. I would be more specific in your suggestion for future researh. Would examining the college proficiency or job placement of these students be interesting? Why? What insights could it provide?
Good luck with the rest of your editing!
(668)
Hey Brian! Ever since we used to talk in Spanish I have been really curious to hear what you found about "that" school. So I was really excited to have the change to read your paper. I feel like I kind of expected the results, but some did bits were more nuanced than I thought and I am really impressed with the academic style of your study and results.
ReplyDeleteA lot of my comments were not so much information driven, but grammar driven. I definitely think you are wordy and have some tendencies like "this" and "so" that can be easily fixed. It's a tedious editing process, I know I have similar problems.
I still felt like there was a lack of evidence in some sections, like your methods. You can (and should) use sources to justify the methods chosen and define them or justify how you decided to make certain choices like samples or questions asked. Also, when establishing credibility for the sources, I have learned in my own paper that it is way more effective to talk about how they got to the conclusions than just stating the university they work at. this will boost your credibility so much if you do it.
I really enjoyed reading your discussion section! I thought you did a great job breaking up all of the themes and discussing them in depth. A small tip might be to include something in the first explanation how you are using small quotes from the teachers, because my tired brain initially glanced at the quotes and was confused where they were coming from. So just make is explicit for your reader by including, "said some teachers" like the first time you use a quote.
I hope you have some good feedback! I honestly feel like your paper is very strong.
Hey Brian!
ReplyDeleteI first want to say that your research was extremely fascinating, especially as a “survivor” (so far) of our school. I found that I could relate to a lot of your findings, which was extremely enlightening. I’m sure that you also had some fun analyzing the environment we all grew up in.
Anyways, here’s my feedback:
The first element of your paper that needs/needed some work is style. Your paper is full of unclear demonstratives and pronouns that make it a bit of a mess to understand at times. Moreover, I cut around 300 words in my feedback doc not by deleting sections but by simply rewording sentences (i.e., removing passive voices and weird long phrases that were often replaced with stuff like “can” or “must”). Please check out my doc for the specifics and to accept the changes. And look out for these things in the future.
Your literature review was a great element of your paper. I think that a major point that you should emphasize when you discuss public vs private school is to show that education should serve all students without discrimination based on income. Such a justification would demonstrate the need for charter schools as well. You could also connect this back in your results based upon the limitations of non-public schools: private schools often filter out students based on socioeconomic status, while charter schools like the one in your study weed out by motivation and drive. Idk could be interesting? At points, your lit review is also dominated by other sources, so please fix that. You do clearly establish the importance of your study though, so nice job.
Your methods were largely extremely clear and conciseexcept for a few confusing elements (e.g., selection bias that isn’t selection bias, and the audiotape explanation).
The results and discussion are where your paper started to fall off in quality slightly… I like your tables and charts. They are very clear. At points (e.g., the extracurricular part), I have no idea what you mean and you need much more explanation. The more integrated quotes, the better honestly. And starting with the “Strong support network” section, you provide much much less examples and sort of just spew off interpretations, which was very confusing and sort of made the reader just believe you. EVIDENCE, EVIDENCE, EVIDENCE, even though your study is qualitative.
As you said yourself, your discussion needs work. At several points, you introduce results not described in the results section, which is a classic error for a discussion section. Regarding teacher autonomy, This isn’t nuance tbh, youre just saying too much is bad, too little is bad. You need to get more than this, through the quotes you got. You make some excellent points. Just would love some more quotes and examples – I’m not sure how phenomenological studies should work, but that would make it much more engaging.
Let’s get your results and discussion up to par with your other parts of your paper, and we’ll be golden!
Good stuff,
Yash
P.S. I did my comments on my plane ride to Memphis, so the comments are from my dad's name because my Office Account is registered under his name...
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