Reflection

First, I'd like to say that this has been the best classroom experience thus far in the Special Education tract. I'd definitely continue to infuse the activities into the overall scope of each week's session. They really helped me wrap my brain around a lot of the concepts and objectives that would otherwise be difficult to explain and comprehend. A good example of this was the coding activity. That activity really helped me understand the aim and focus of what it means to be a qualitative researcher.
With that said, my opinion of research has definitely changed. I have found a great appreciation for the amount of work, dedication, planning, and effort that goes into developing a research question, finding related articles, attempting to add to that research, as well as answering the initial research problem. It's not easy, that's for sure.
As a special educator I am, by law, per IDEA, supposed to integrate research-driven and empirically proven methods to help educate my students. This class has helped and will continue to help me uncover these methods as well as discover their transferability and usable qualities for the education of this population. It has also helped my identify what research is "good" and what research is "bad".
While I really don't want to be a researcher or do any more research, I feel much better equipped to answer pertinent and nagging questions that surround the field of education. Research in this field is and will continue to be crucial as policy makers will continue to base decisions and changes upon the research. Therefore every decision I make as an educator will be based on previous research and any changes to the curriculum will also be reliant on new research. This class has definitely helped me understand and accept this relationship.

Ethnographic Study: The Beach

Kinda cool to be at the beach during spring break, here's what I saw:

The house I am in overlooks a bar called The Windjammer. Upon inspection, it seems a cross section of humanity enters and exits for meals and refreshment. Men and women of all ages and races frequent this establishment. The line out front swells down the front stairs as young people, old people and families scramble down the sidewalk for the opportunity at food and refreshment. That's not to say there isn't a majority of people that frequents the Windjammer. This majority is what I would classify as "frat boys". They mingle by volleyball courts, playing, games, drinking, and conversing.
While I am not sure that they are fraternity members or even college students, I must classify them as such due to the similarities they share with my previous experiences with the social group I identify as "frat boys". The definable features of "frat boys" as I see it is a propensity for using the word "dude", sandals, high fives, backwards baseball caps, shorts, lame tribal tattoos, and the complete lack of T-shirts despite the current temperature. Researcher bias? Perhaps.
As the J. Giles Band blasts from the Windjammer speakers, the "frat boys" compete in a beach volleyball game almost as intense as the final scene from the movie "Sideout". The high-fives are in full effect as "dude" after "dude" hits a "killer shot, brah". Eventually the game ends and once the chest bumps and high fives are through,it's off to the bar for another round before the next game ensues.

Reich Article

The author of this article is taking a look at the reasoning and deductive skills involved in multiple choice test taking. He then weighs the results against the guidelines the test makers included the questions for. Essentially, the author is testing the quality of the state adminstered test against the state standard education by using not only the results of the tests themselves but the individual thought processes of each student taking the test in regard to how they produced each answer. All in all, the article represents a fairly complicated but understandibly important test of validity that has the potential of influincing and shaping how we educate and test students going forward.

If I had the opportunity to ask questions to the researcher the first question I would ask is if he plans to do this test on a larger scale? More studetns? Across multiple states? etc.

I would then ask if he expects to see similar results?

I would then ask what considerations should be made to future history curriculums and tests?

I would then ask what forms of test taking represent "best practices" in regard to using the proper reasoning to produce the correct answer? Essay? Short answer? etc.

How effective of a measure are the "think aloud" sessions? What I mean is as an observer in the think aloud 1:1 setting, how reliant is that method of really letting the student think-aloud? Would an empty, microphoned room elicit different responses?

Zumbrunn Proposal

The researcher is looking at the correlation between self-efficacy beliefs in students' writing and perceptions on teacher feedback. Basically, if you think you're a good writer and your teacher does too, you'll get good grades on writing assignments. The researcher looked at studies that showed that if a student believes he/she is good at or has the potential to succeed at something that they will work hard at it in order to achieve success. Also teacher feedback can influence the quality of student writing.

The first question I'd have to ask would be why try and correlate something so seemingly obvious? I mean if you think you're good and your teacher tells you you're good, then you're probably going to achieve success.

That's not to say the there aren't interesting questions to be found from this study however. The second question would be if they found any interesting results across the student body? Do girls get more positive feedback than boys? What do the self-efficacy and feedback scores from Latino students in comparison to Caucasians in a Midwestern Community?

The third question would be how were threats to validity controlled i.e. how honest do you think the students taking the survey were? How honest were they with their grades as well?

The fourth question would deal with the survey/scales themselves. How reliable are they? Can/will they be used again on a different population?

The fifth question would be how were the subjects selected? Was it a random assignment, were the subjects assigned, selected, etc?

Cause and Effect

I like this topic as it is very relevant to my work at the Faison School for Autism. As a teacher at Faison I wear several hats, one of which is the hat of a behavioralist. Often I am looking for setting events and/or antecedents to problem behaviors a student emits. These behaviors impede the students academic progress at best and present unsafe and in some cases life-threatening scenarios at worst. In many ways I try to understand what the cause of such intense behavioral outbursts. With this information, I can make informed decisions on modifying a student's work cycle, daily routine, social interactions, etc.

This understanding of cause and effect research is very beneficial on an individual level. It's a key component to what I do as a professional. When discussing this in the realm of social science, or applying it to larger populations as a whole, I feel you do yourself a disservice. As I stated earlier, cause and effect research is most effective on a case-by-case basis. Not everyone is going to experience and recieve stimuli in the same fashion and not everyone is going to have the same perspective or respond with the same affect.

Developing causal relationships on a large scale has got to be one of the hardest undertakings a researcher can do. In fact, it may be borderline impossible as there never seems to be definitive proof even after years of research has been conducted. Not everyone agrees about cigarettes and cancer, there's still a quiet debate over the concept of global warming/climate change and the validity of that theory based on a cause and effect relationship.

This cause based research may also feature questionable ethics. These are the ones that have the research attempt to make a universal claim -- such as the role vaccinations play in autism diagnoses. A bold and almost reckless conclusion such as that provides people with hope only and the role of research has little to do with hope.

Measuring

My research problem is looking at the self-esteem of students diagnosed with a learning disabilities who participate in athletics versus their non-disabled peers. Three ways to measure self-esteem to answer this research problem would be use of interview, questionnaire, and survey. Each measure would be looking directly at self esteem and the questions posed within each would reflect that concept. For instance, an interviewer might ask "How does playing sports and competing make you feel?" The questionnaire may feature simple yes no questions as well as open-ended questions for students to write out what they're feeling. The survey would be something akin to the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale which is designed much like a Likert scale running the gamut from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
The validity and reliability of this information may very well be questionable at the end of the day. I brought up the Rosenberg scale because it was listed as the most reliable and widely-used measure for self-esteem. But, if the students don't understand how to respond to the questions the final results may be worthless.A learning disabled student or a typically developed student may not fully understand the concepts discussed within each measure so choosing the right population is important -- but this could also jeopardize the validity of the overall work if the populations are too similar.

Ethics

It's funny, when I start to think about ethics within the realm of educational research I can't help but come to the realization that ethics are ensuring that no real definitive conclusions can be reached. And I say thankfully for the simple reason that the scientific method really does not apply to research done in an educational setting. For instance, a control group will never receive a "placebo" education. Meaning, researchers would never knowingly offer a substandard or false education in order to prove the effectiveness of another.

This is a crucial characteristic that not only separates educational research from medicinal, it also speaks to the sheer number of educational interventions that exist. It also unfortunately speaks to the number of bogus/ineffective interventions out there too. This is a double-edged sword that, as an educator, I must walk and be aware of when doing research or simply Google-ing lesson plan ideas. Believe me, there's a lot of crap on the internet.

I digress, but it's this human element combined with the fact that you really need to keep the best interests of the student in mind when conducting any research in education that speaks to the separation I spoke of a paragraph ago. And do me, this need to provide the means for a child/student to access the best possible outcome should be the crux of any educational research. At the heart of all research should be the student. Whether they are divided into groups, classes, or treated as individuals, good educational research needs to somehow, regardless of topic or stated research problem answer simple questions like "what helps students engage in learning, what helps students retain learning, and what helps students apply learning".

The text mentions ten specific guidelines that must be adhered to when conducting research with humans. They are all great, but unless I missed it, there was little abut keeping personal information confidential. The issue of confidentiality is especially important when I think about my particular research problem in regard to athletic activity and self-esteem in learning disabled students. When we're talking about personal things like a clinical diagnosis and issues of self-image, sensitivity to your research subjects must also be a component of your research as, in this case, key details like names, school names, and school location may actually prove to be counterintuitive.

Blog Post 3

For the purposes of this assignment, the research problem I will examine are the factors that contribute to the resignation of first-year teachers. With that in mind, the participants I will use need to be individuals who worked as teachers for only one year and resigned, never to set foot in a classroom again.

Probability Sampling

Simple Random Sampling
Pros
* Good for small populations
* Every member/individual of population has an equal chance for being selected
Cons
* Not good for large populations
* May be technologically dependent -- computers for randomization

Systematic Sampling
Pros
* Good with large populations
Cons
* Can be manipulated due to patterns within population -- periodicity

Stratified Sampling
Pros
* Through grouping, the results can be more representative of the population as a whole
* Less errors
* Grouping also leads researcher to consider more variables i.e. male v. female
Cons
* Can lead to lots of groups
* Cumbersome

Cluster Sampling
Pros
* Saves time and money
Cons
* Less accurate

Nonprobability Sampling

Convenience Sampling
Pros
* Availibilty
* Good at finding relationships
Cons
* Not precise
* Haphazard
* May lead to bias

Quota Sampling
Pros
* Representative of entire population
Cons
* Not random
* Subjects selected based upon specific criteria

Based on these breakdowns I would have to choose the method of stratified sampling to best discover the results. I imagine that there are a number of former first year teachers who never saw year two. These people will no doubt be as diverse as the school systems and students they educated. the use of grouping would help me, the researcher, place the resigned teachers in different groups and sample these groups in order to find any similarities in their responses.

Blog Post 2

The first article I chose is titled "Academic and Athletic Self-Concept of Students with Learning Disabilities". The title is what really drew me to the article due to the fact that it basically asks the same qualitative research problem I posed last week. The interesting thing though is that the results I expected in my problem are not the same as the results found in the study. I expected to find the research credit sports for increasing student self-concept among the population. This article, however, really only serves to further prove the point that students diagnosed/classified as having a learning disability have lower self-esteem and than their typically developing peers in regard to academics. Seems pretty obvious, especially if they've been told they are learning disabled and/or receive education in separate classrooms/schools.

The study was essentially a student poll taken at a private school for students with learning disabilities that reinforced the negative self-concept among this population and, to my surprise, found that athletics are no different. Essentially, students with learning disabilities don't think they're good at sports and don't really want to play them. 6% play because they want to and 83% of respondents said they only play them because their parents expected them to.

Dev, P., Smith, J.M., Lescynski, M., & Ladrigan, P.M. (2006). Academic and athletic self- concept of students with learning disabilities. International Journal of Learning, 12(5), 341-344.

The second article was titled "Relating Physical Education and Activity Levels to Academic Achievement in Children". Much like the first article this one is unique in that it is similar to the qualitative research problem I posed last week. This article looked at both physical education classes and how vigorous an activity or a routine a student performed in relation to academic achievement. The study found that the more vigorous the activity a student participated in the higher the academic outcome they achieved in relation to their more inactive peers.

This article was very short, but it answered a lot of questions and even left more open as the author addressed an point, students who participate in more sports are generally from a higher socio-economic class. The study was also interesting in that it championed phys ed in the curriculum but found that participation in phys ed produced no measurable affect on academic achievement.

Siegel, Donald (2007). Relating physical education and activity levels to academic achievement in children. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, 78(1), 10.

The biggest problem I've encountered with my research has been finding a good amount of articles that relate to my research problem. This can be easily alleviated by toying with my research problem and/or looking at the problem from a new perspective.

Qualitative V. Quanitative

For the purposes of this assignment, I am taking a look at sports participation and its affect on high school students diagnosed with learning disabilities. More specifically, I will be looking at the positive affects organized sports can have on those students as they transition through high school and move toward adulthood.

If my aim was to pose a qualitative research question, the title of my article and/or the research problem I'd try to solve would probably look something like: Self Identity, Self Esteem, and Self Confidence: A Study of High School Athletes Diagnosed with Learning Disabilities and the Role of Organized Sports in Identity. This qualitative distinction is apparent due the subjective nature of the research problem. There's not going to be a whole lot of hard data in an article with that title. An article that carries that title will no doubt be more narrative in tone and nature and full of interviews in order to best describe the results.

A quantitative research problem that tackles the same issue would pose a research problem that asks a question like: Academic Performance and High School Sports from 1980-2000: Do Student Athletes Achieve Better Outcomes than Non-Athletes? This is apparent in the use of variables associated with the question as well as the prevalent use of data over a long period of time. This will question would no doubt over a number of participants and a very objective result.