Standard 11 Meta-Reflection: Inquiry/Research
Standard (11) Inquiry/Research: Competently consumes and produces where necessary empirical data to guide educational practice.
The Excel Project
This Excel Project Artifact was the final project in Interpreting and Applying Educational Research II. In this project I was to use the data obtained in 1997 from the Department of Education in response to questions regarding the equity of funding in public education. I used the data to speak to whether or not school spending and academic performance are statistically related. This project applied my knowledge of research statistics and Excel in that, not only did I have to use the data to create frequency histograms, box plots, scatterplots, and run an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), but I also had to explain what each of those analyses meant for this data set. I had to know if the frequency diagrams I created made sense with the data at hand and how to read box plots to analyze the data for skewness. I ran into problems because the ANOVA spreadsheet I was using was not working properly. I had to know enough about the ANOVA to know that the results didn’t make sense and to fix my spreadsheet.
Because of this project I am a more conscientious consumer of research and research-based teaching and assessment strategies. It is important to keep in mind that when looking at educational data a high correlation does not indicate a cause-effect relationship. It was interesting to see again that there isn’t a correlation between pupil per teacher ratio and student test scores. It appears that good teaching and learning can occur, regardless of the size of the classroom.
After practicing with frequency distributions I am now running frequency distributions in my classes after major tests and quizzes so that I can see easily how many students have understood the material. Because I took the time to do this on our last test I was able to see that my students were not communicating their knowledge of graphing as completely as I knew they could, so I was able to re-teach one section of our unit to make sure that more students could communicate what they knew. Now that I have more practice with Excel I have used scatterplots in class to show students the correlation between the number of practice assignments students complete and their grades on tests. This helps me to see if the practice I am giving my students is helping them on the assessments.
The Research Proposal
The Research Proposal artifact demonstrates my competency as a consumer of research and my ability to produce a proposal to begin research. This proposal was the culminating project in Interpreting and Applying Educational Research 1 and uses the knowledge I gained from the class including how to write an educational research hypothesis, how to use my clearly worded purpose to drive my research design, and how to show how my design can control the threats to validity and reliability.
I designed my research proposal for use in my classroom in order to directly impact student learning. I hope to carry out this research this year to see if by giving students more feedback in the form of formative assessments their achievement will increase on a unit test. Using data to drive my instruction should make me a better teacher and increase student learning.
The best predictor of student success in the classroom is teacher competency. I want to use the data I collect about student progress to make me a more responsive and competent teacher so my science students can achieve as much as possible.
