Back to my first love.....#3

Being a sociology major and having taken a few anthropology classes, qualitative research is more up my ally. I love people and culture watching...well observing. Observation will not only lend itself well to our research project but our career as future teachers. The qualitative method works well with my study because I am not forming a hypothesis but rather asking a question. I agree with Dr. McCoy though in her reiteration that research is not black and white and I do believe that my research could benefit from using a few methods (if that is feasible or necessary). Observation would lend itself well in analyzing student motivation. Using one of the structured observation methods would be useful in producing data that could be compared and contrasted in classrooms that used canonical lit. versus ones that did not. In the study that my quantitative group presented it classified student behavior as on task or off task. I could mimic that study but figure out what student behaviors illustrated motivation (posture, involvement, etc). In an ideal world, I would like to use observation and still create a student survey or interview in order to have thorough data. We shall see how that plays out in the fall though when reality sets in!