After a small panic last week, I decided that I will stick with my topic because it is the most interesting to me. I want to be the most effective teacher I can be and getting inside the heads of students now will help in the future. Part of my problem last week was that I was searching in ERIC with bad terms. I had a temporary ditz moment and was not thinking that a student's "attitude" is similar to their "perception" or "view" or "affect." Therefore, after plugging in that golden word, I found a plethora of information focusing on different aspects of student attitude toward social studies. I have a few more solid ideas about how to go about obtaining pertinent information as well as what exactly I want that pertinent info to be.
I like Dr. McCoy's suggestion of using a focus group (although I am still considering the survey). I am interested in the attitudes of students who perform well and poorly in social studies and come from a variety of backgrounds. Maybe one or two focus groups for four schools. Is that too many? The focus groups could contain six students from a world history class. Could I ask the teacher to hand pick a few students who they think will participate and add to the discussion? I would want to ensure that the 6 students do not all hold the same opinion towards the subject. I also would like to observe classes in a few different schools, perhaps as different as Reagan, Atkins, Reynolds and Parkland, to get a good spectrum. I would like to watch a wide variety of teachers--more experienced and less experienced, those with many high-performing students and others with low-performing students.
I realize a lot of different aspects affect attitude. I am interested specifically to see how teaching methods, testing, class discussion and arrangement, as well as teacher attitude, passion about their subject, and overall class environment affect students' attitudes. Some of my favorite teachers would have a couch, a lamp, a candy bowl, and some sort of artistic collection (pictures, cows, timelines, etc.). How do aspects like that affect the learning environment? My teachers all claimed that those small details made a difference, and I enjoyed their classes. So I am interested in viewing such classrooms from an outsider's perspective.
I may now have to return to the problem of narrowing my topic!
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Sarah, I agree that you are back to needing to narrow your topic. You have a number of excellent ideas here, and I think you will have a better research experience if you have a clear focus. You might want to just focus on something like teaching methods and student attitude. This would be a good survey or interview or focus group study.
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