My initial impression of educational research is that it is a much more challenging and complex process than I originally had imagined. Moving from using articles, books, or journals of simple research papers or a thesis to actually running qualitative or quantitative research is a major switch from my previous experience. It seems on first reading that this would be a daunting task to focus on a specific topic from the wide array of possibilities and still manage to conduct significant research. From personal experience and background, I’m primarily having thoughts on investigating technology use, specifically calculators, in the classroom and somehow relating it to student attitudes and/ or achievement. While currently a broad topic, and may lead more to teacher attitude and pedagogy rather than students, I hope to find previous research to guide me more. The research required would be of both quantitative and qualitative nature possibly requiring interviews, survey, test scores, and general classroom observations. A much more general topic that I find interest but slightly away from my mathematics background is the continuing argument about student seating in class and it’s affect on performance or achievement. This theory is something that is generally thrown around a lot to students, and has some interest to personally see for myself in research its validity. It will become important for either topic to specify and operationally define in detail what specific traits I want to compare as I move forward toward a more focused research question.
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3 comments:
Matt, I like your interest in calculator use. I think it might be a better topic than seat arrangement. There has been a continuing debate in the math ed community for years about this, and it is not settled yet. I think it could easily be a teacher or student attitude study.. Lots of opportunity here.
Matt, I really like your ideas about studying the use of calculators! In my high school calculus class, our teacher forbid us to use calculators - ever. It was pretty brutal at first, but I felt like I learned more in that math class than in any others I've ever had, including college. :) I guess the point of my little anecdote is that you might find some really interesting results by studying this topic.
I wonder if studying student attitudes towards math might be a good option - I was also thinking that you could look at standardized test scores to correlate calculator use with academic achievement, but don't most standardized tests allow all students to use calculators? You might want to look at a standardized test in which calculators are not permitted, if you want to go that route!
Very interesting Matt. I remember some math courses where my instructors forbid math courses. My "common sense" inclination would be that one would learn more without having the calculator to lean on. Nevertheless, I seem to remember (bare with me, the last time I took math was my freshman year in college) was that with certain complex things, a calculator just didn't seem all that useful other than for crunching numbers (large multiplication, squaring numbers, etc).
In short, I think a study the use of calculators in a relatively high level math course where many concepts come into play (say calculus) would really get at how much calculators affect higher math learning.
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