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!

So Close, Yet So Far

Hey Everybody! So this is the last week that I have until I am out on my own actually implementing my research! I am really excited about starting all of this and have made pretty significant progress since last week.

When I wrote my blog post last week, I did not have a schedule for when I would be sitting in on classrooms, my consent forms did not provide sufficient assurances that confidentiality and anonymity would be kept, and my methods section was a total mess. Although I have not completely finished all of these tasks, I am a lot closer than I was before.

During this past week, I met with the last teacher that I needed to talk to, developed a tentative schedule for when I will be observing all of the classes, developed drafts of emails to send to all of the teachers, improved my consent forms and interview questions, changed my blog formatting to be more user friendly, edited my literature review, and completely reworked my methods section.

 

(Me this past week)

I know that was a pretty long list of stuff that I did, so I am going to break it down and explain what still needs to be done and what exactly I did.

The first thing that I am going to talk about is about the logistics for my project. Since I only have two weeks to conduct my primary research, I developed a tentative schedule for when I will be sitting in on the different classes that I need to observe. Before I email these teachers about this schedule though, I still need to figure out when exactly I will be interviewing each teacher. I have a draft of an email that is ready to send, and so I just need to do that. Once I have planned my interviews out, then I can solidify my observation schedule.

Second, this week I finished working on all of the supporting documents that I need for my project. Although most of these documents were already written, I edited and finalized these documents this week so that they are ready to be used for my research. In addition to finalizing these documents, I also created an overall coding sheet that specifically states the information that I need to collect for my research. Before this week, I did not know what information I actually wanted to collect for my research, and so developing this document was really useful in justifying my methods, determining what information I need, and organizing my methods section.

Lastly, in terms of the actual paper itself, I am almost done editing my literature review and am currently working on my methods section. Besides coordinating logistics with teachers, editing, finishing, and perfecting this paper is going to be my primary focus this week. Since I am pretty much done with the rest of my classes, I will have a lot of time to dedicate to finishing up these two sections of my paper. After I finish this though, then I will be ready to go out on my own and do my research.

(When class finally ends and I get to conduct my research!)

           That’s all for this week. I look forward to updating everybody again next week with the status of my project!

Preparation in Progress

Hey everybody! Only a couple more weeks until I am out conducting my independent research. Because this time is approaching so quickly, today’s blog post will discuss where I am in implementing my methods and how this correlates with the schedule I created for myself several posts back.

              Currently, I have not started conducting my research yet, however I am in the process of preparing to begin my research soon. For my research, I will be implementing surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to get as complete of an understanding of the school I will be researching as possible. For my surveys, all my questions have been written, the survey has been created on Survey Monkey, and the link has been sent out to Mrs. Haag to be distributed to teachers.  

For my interviews, I have informally talked to all eight of the teachers that I want to interview, and have received verbal consent to interview these teachers. Additionally, my interview questions for these teachers have been written, and I am currently in the process of planning the logistics for when I can interview these teachers. I have not yet asked the head of school for an interview yet, however I have been given permission to conduct my research in the building.

Lastly, for my classroom observations, I have directly spoken to all but one teacher about observing their classrooms; however, this one teacher is aware that I would like to observe their class, but I just need to find them to confirm this in person. From the teachers I have spoken to, I have been given their teaching schedules, and so I am in the process of planning the days and times for when I want to come in and observe classes. Once I have received the schedule from the last teacher, then I will finalize my schedule for when I want to come in. This is so not only I can plan, but also so that the teachers can have advance notice for when they should be expecting me. Additionally, for my observations, I have the coding sheet that I intend to use for my observations. Because of this, once I am finished with my classes on February 2, then I will be ready to observe classes starting the following week.

Currently, I am almost on schedule. This past week was supposed to be used for gathering general information about the school I will be studying; however, after the critique of my methods, this part has been for the most part removed. In my schedule, I said that I planned to start conducting interviews in the next week. Because I am currently focused on perfecting my methods and literature review sections, I do not plan to do interviews this week; however, I will send out emails this week to set up interviews for the next several weeks. Despite this setback, I believe that this will not be a problem because I will have over three weeks to conduct these interviews. As long as they are all complete by February 18, then I will have enough time to do my data analysis. With this being said though, I would like to be done conducting interviews by February 11, so I can get a head start on my data analysis.

That’s all for this week! I will be continuing to prepare for conducting my research, and look forward to blogging again soon. See you all next week!

Method To My Madness

Hey everybody! It’s been awhile since my last blog post, but I am excited to start blogging more consistently again. For this week’s post, I will be reflecting on the development of my methods as well as for discussing what I think my primary weaknesses are for my methods. Since I have not had my paper critiqued yet, I will focus on what I believe is the weakest part of my method, as well as for what feedback I anticipate receiving for this section.

For the development of my methods, I had to draw from multiple sources to develop procedures that were comprehensive enough to gather the information that I need. Since there were no ethnographies done on a single charter school, I had to incorporate aspects of larger charter school studies, to understand what information that I was trying to get, traditional school studies, to determine how to collect my data, and then also ethnographies, to understand how to develop a holistic approach of the environment that I was studying. Fortunately, I had a source that explained the usefulness and quality of each method used to research charter schools, and so this was an indispensable resource in developing my methods.

After researching the various methods that could be used to obtain a complete understanding of a school, I decided that I needed to surveys, interviews, and classroom observations. The rationale behind using these methods were that in order to understand a school, it needs to be understood both inside and outside the classroom, and from as many perspectives as possible. By surveying teachers, it allows me to gain a comprehensive understanding of their thoughts and opinions about the school. Then, by interviewing teachers and administration, it allows me to get a more in depth understanding of how the school operates and has changed, according to the faculty who have been at the school the longest. Finally, the classroom observations will show me how teachers and students interact with one another, which can give clues as to what the classroom atmosphere is and how student learning in affected by this.

Although I have a good understanding of how I will be collecting this information and have taken appropriate measures to ensure the ethicality of my project and the confidentiality of my participants, I am still not completely sure how I will be conducting my data analysis. The problem with my methods and research is that the data I will be getting is very open-ended, and so I am unsure of what type of responses that I will actually be receiving. My current plan for this is that I intend to sort data into categories based on the five components which I believe cause student and school success, which is based off the literature I read; however, it is possible that there may be factors that affect student success which I may not be currently aware of. Because of this, my analysis will have to adapt to the data and responses that I receive to extract meaningful results. Although the plan for doing this is to carefully record my data, and then compare it to other responses to look for similarities and commonalities, I am still unsure about how effective this method will be, based upon my data.

Besides this though, I am feeling confident about my research and am excited to begin doing so. Until then, I will keep on working on perfecting my research and methods. With that being said, this concludes this week’s blog. See you all next week!