While the idea of a study is a little overwhelming right now, my initial thoughts are to study something having to do with teacher expectations for students and how they affect student performance in the classroom. In an education class I took last year, we read an article about the Pygmalion effect, and I have been really intrigued by the topic ever since. Basically, a study was done that showed that when teachers had higher expectations for a group of students, they unconsciously acted in ways that led these students to higher achievement. Likewise, when teachers had lower expectations for students, their unconscious actions negatively affected student performance. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly sure how to go about measuring teacher expectations. Perhaps a survey? Also, will teachers really being willing to admit that they have lower expectations for some students? If these expectations could be gathered though, they could be compared to student achievement in the classroom based on some sort of assessment. Based on what we have talked about so far in class, I feel like my best bet right now is to just spend some time searching through ERIC and other databases and seeing if this is a feasible topic, or if I find something else that sparks my interest.
While my ideas for a study are still very tentative, I feel pretty sure that I would like to approach the study from a more quantitative angle than qualitative. Being a math person, I much more prefer to work with numbers and statistics than narratives J.
2 comments:
Jen, I really like this topic. I believe that teacher expectations are extremely important. I agree that you might worry about teachers admitting they expect less from some students. Another option might be to interview or survey students and ask them what they think their teachers expect of them. It might be that what the students think has more influence than what the teachers really think. This would be somewhat qualitative, but even though we math folks prefer numbers, we can do words, too!!
I feel the same way you do about qualitative vs. quantitative research! I feel that I too may have a tendency toward the concreteness of quantitative research rather than the open-endedness of qualitative research because of my math brain! As we talked about in class, there is often a blending between the two types of research, and it is likely that we will be called to perform both types. When the time comes, hopefully we won't be so intimidated by the words of qualitative research!
Post a Comment