Looking for Results

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)

Looking For Answers

Hey everybody! So this concludes my last week of conducting my independent research! This past week has been nothing short of interesting as it has been filled with work, research, and the most intense job interview of my life (I wish I could tell you more but its classified!). While I enjoyed talking with teachers and observing their classes to get a better understanding of the school community, I am excited to focus on analyzing my data. With that being said, I have a lot of work to do during this next week.

During the data collection process, I collected 14 surveys, observed 26 classes for five teachers, and interviewed 8 teachers and one administrator. Now that I am done collecting all of this information, I need to meticulously go through it all to identify the themes common throughout all of the data. Going into the data collection process two weeks ago, I knew what type of information I was looking for, but I had no idea how I was actually going to go through the information and do the analysis. This was one of the most serious problems I had with my research for quite a while. My biggest problem was that I was going to be doing a qualitative analysis, so there were no rigid procedures that I could follow like with a quantitative analysis. Because of this, I spent a lot of time over these past couple weeks reading ethnographies and literature on how to perform qualitative research to ensure that I used proper analysis techniques.

From this reading, and the developments I made in my research along the way, I was able to develop my methods for how I am going to do my analysis. The first step is to transcribe all of the audio files that I have from the interviews. This is probably going to take the most time for my analysis because I have over 3 hours of audio that I need to transcribe by hand. While this will take a long time, I believe that transcribing these interviews (in addition to already transcribing my notes I took during the interviews) will help me to identify the most important themes present in these conversations. Once I have all of these interviews transcribed, and have noted the most important themes present in these interviews, then I am going to compare all of the teacher responses for each individual question to see if there is a consensus for the responses given to these questions. This should result in the identification of the main themes present throughout these interviews.

In addition to the interviews though, I will be using similar methods for the surveys. Although the majority of my data analysis will come from the interviews, the surveys will be a useful validity check. Since the survey respondents are anonymous and I had no control over which teachers took the survey, they provide a random sample of teachers. Because of this, I can compare what these teachers said to the teachers I chose to interview to see if there is a variation in the responses provided.

Finally, I am going to use my observations as a second validity check. Because some of the questions asked involved student-teacher interactions and the classroom environment, then these observations will be useful in seeing if what the teachers said correlates with what actually happens in the classroom. By the end of all of this, I hope to understand what the most common responses among these methods are, so that when I do my discussion, I can use these themes to understand what characteristics actually make this school successful and why.

So that’s all for this week! I apologize if this post was a little longer  than usual, but I found it useful in collecting my thoughts. Until next week!

(639 words)

All About That Data

Hey everybody! So I know that the primary focus of these blogs are supposed to be about my progress with my research, but I thought that now that I am out on my own, I might as well include some information about the rest of my life so that you guys know what I have been doing last week and will be doing next week. So to start, today I was flown out of state all expenses paid to interview for a summer internship. Although I don’t want to give away the specifics yet, I just wanted to say that I am pretty excited about this opportunity.

Anyways, back to my research. This past week was the first week where I was out on my own conducting my research. Although it seems like I have a lot of freedom and independence, I still spent the week at school (maybe I’m not as free as I thought). As most of you are probably aware, the purpose of my research is to determine what qualities are representative of a successful charter school, and so, to do this, I have to spend a lot of time at school. Because of this, I spent this entire week observing 16 classes and conducting 7 interviews. I know that it might seem like I am complaining right now, but I have actually been enjoying my research.

So far, the interviews have been my favorite part of what I have been doing. I have talked with such a cognizant, enthusiastic group of teachers and believe that I gained a lot of really good insight into the school by talking to them. Going into these interviews, I was worried that I would not have enough to talk about, but in fact it is actually turning out to be the opposite. Although this has been my most successful method so far, my other ones are still proving useful as well. I have noticed that my observations have been backing up and exemplifying a lot of what the teachers I interviewed have said about the student body and teachers. I am excited for when I do my actual data analysis to see what other connections emerge.

Anyways, moving onto the plan for next week. Since I only have one more week for data collection, then, by the end of this week, I want to have all of my data collected and organized so that I can begin my data analysis the week after. I already have an organization system established for my data; now my biggest task is transcribing my interviews. I have been looking for software that can take an audio file and automatically transcribe it, but right now it is looking like I am going to have to run through all of the audio files and transcribe myself. This is going to be a big task, since I have over three hours of audio, and so this will probably be what I spend most of my free time doing this week.

That is all for this week! I look forward to updating everybody next week for another report of my progress.

(523 words)

It's Game Time!

Its finally game time! Since it's Super Bowl weekend, I thought that there was no better way to start this post than with a sports reference.

Anyways, now that I am finally done with my normal classes, I get to focus exclusively on conducting and implementing my research. This is going to be the most interesting part of the entire year, and so I am really excited to begin tomorrow.

While it is exciting to be finally finished with classes, I still have a lot of work to do. Because of this, I really need to stay motivated and on task. It will be nice to not have to wake up at 6 and go to bed at midnight every single day, but I will have to work hard to not fall into the trap of thinking that I am done and that I can relax. This is what I foresee being my biggest struggle for the third trimester. Knowing myself, I am the type of person who has to stay constantly busy in order to keep my motivation up, or else I fall into the slump of sleeping until noon and watching Netflix the rest of the day.

Because of this, I am going to need to find productive ways of spending my time in addition to my research so my quality of work does not suffer. Although my research will still be my top priority, I also plan to work and start going to the gym during this trimester to prevent myself from getting lazy. In addition to this, I am also in the process of developing a schedule to plan out how much time I should be spending each day working on my research. For the first two weeks, I will be spending a lot of time collecting my data, which will take up most of my day. However, after that, my plan, as of right now, is to spend two to three hours every day working on research.

Shifting gears a little bit, I now want to transition from what I plan on doing to what I have done over the last week. The biggest accomplishment from this week--besides finishing my classes-- was finishing my literature review and methods section. I had to completely reorganize and rewrite my methods section for my paper, and so I feel pretty accomplished submitting this part of my project.

Besides that though, my survey also went live (I already have 13 responses!); I finalized my observation schedule; and I secured dates for when I will be interviewing all of the teachers. The only response that I am still currently waiting for is from the head of the school; however, I sent that email late last week and so I will give it a day or two longer before I reach out again. Overall, though, I am prepared and ready to begin conducting my own research.

I look forward to updating everybody again next week!