Blog #3

It is still early and I still want to keep my options open, but the assessment idea is really starting to grow on me. If I think about this research project in a very practical sense, researching student assessments in the social studies classroom could really be beneficial to me as a teacher. And believe me, I am all about being practical and making this project as useful to me as possible.

I have received feedback from Dr. McCoy and my piers on the possibilities of approaching this from either the student or teacher perspective, or possibly both. As I start to think about research design, I can see benefits to interviewing and/or surveying both teachers and students and comparing the two sets of data to draw conclusions. This could allow me to gain insight into the types of tests that both teachers and students prefer and which ones they typically dislike, exploring the reasons for each. By comparing the two perspectives, I would imagine that I would find that more often than not teachers and students have very different reasons for preferring a particular type of test. For example, teachers may prefer to use multiple choice tests because they are easy to grade and students may like multiple choice tests because they can make better guesses through the process of elimination. Nonetheless, I would want to set up the methodology so that I could collect good information that would allow me to gain insight into the best ways to fairly and accurately assess student competency in social studies. I see this as being my main goal in researching this topic and feel that exploring both the student and teacher perspective would best help me reach this goal. As I mentioned before, survey construction and the way in which I structure my interview questions would be critical in making sure that my data is valid, and thus I am meeting the goal mentioned above. I'm open to anyone's ideas!