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.