Action
Research Update #3!
During the month of
February, I made the subsequent development on my action research. One area of
the action research that I made a lot of progress on was getting prospective
participants to participate in my study. Around the first week or so of
February, I emailed twenty-five high school teachers including math, science,
social studies, and language arts from various schools in Colorado. I checked
my email and my online survey on a daily basis to see if anyone had taken the
time to respond to my survey. After a week, I began to become a little anxious
because only two people had responded to my survey. After the first week I
emailed another twenty-five high school teachers including consumer family
studies, music, art, and foreign languages teachers. Before long, teachers from
different schools and different content areas began filling out my surveys and
providing me with their signed informed consent forms. From the information provided, I was able to
start to discover patters and themes forming from the research I developed. In
addition, I was also able to get one person to respond to my interview questionnaire.
After around three
weeks, I resent a final email reminder to each potential action research
participant. To make sure I did not resend an email to teachers who already
participated in my study, I created a list of names that would remind me not to
contact these teachers again. I keep this list in a secure location to ensure
no one’s names will be seen by anyone but myself. In the reminder email, I
stated a lot of the same information I stated in the first email. I reminded
participants, who I was, the purpose of the research, and that their principal
had agreed to allow them to take part in the research. I also made the research
concluding date very evident so potential participants would be aware how much
time they had to participate in the research.
In addition, to the progress I made with my action research, I also read and reviewed another article. The literature I reviewed this month is entitled Differentiation of Teaching and Learning: the Teachers’ Perspective, by Stavrou and Koutselini. This article considers differentiation from educator’s viewpoints and highlights the many challenges and successes teachers had when trying to differentiate. In the future, I am planning to review an article by Dixon, F, Yssel, N, McConnell, J, & Hardin, T (2014), Differentiated Instruction, Professional Development and Teacher Efficacy.
In addition, to the progress I made with my action research, I also read and reviewed another article. The literature I reviewed this month is entitled Differentiation of Teaching and Learning: the Teachers’ Perspective, by Stavrou and Koutselini. This article considers differentiation from educator’s viewpoints and highlights the many challenges and successes teachers had when trying to differentiate. In the future, I am planning to review an article by Dixon, F, Yssel, N, McConnell, J, & Hardin, T (2014), Differentiated Instruction, Professional Development and Teacher Efficacy.
It seems that despite your best efforts to prepare yourself and other for your study, you went through some frustrating experiences with collecting your data. I am glad that you were able to eventually get more responses. Did you expect a small number of responses to be an issue? What are your thoughts about why you had an initially small number of responses? What patterns did you see in the responses? I am sure you will address my final question in your next action research update, and I look forward to reading your answer.
ReplyDeleteHey Taylor,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reply. I would say that I did come across some difficulties in collecting my data, however, I learned a lot from this data collection experience and I think I have done the best I could have for my initial time collecting data. Regarding your first question, after about a week of emailing a large number of teachers and not getting many responses, I started to feel like getting participants to respond could become an issue. However, after reading articles about how difficult it can be to get research participants to participate, I feel like I did pretty well at getting the number of responses I received. Regarding your second question, I feel like I initially had a small number of responses because I was an outside researcher that was trying to get potential study participants to participate even though I had never worked with the participants or built a relationship with the participants. I think being persistent and respectful about contacting potential participants paid off over the course of the research. Regarding your third question, I have started to see some patterns but, I have not analyzed all of the data yet to provide information about distinct patterns. One pattern I did come across was that the majority of participants had either some or extensive experience with differentiation.