When I first heard about the opportunity to conduct educational research at
However, now that I actually have the opportunity to implement my own research project, I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the many possibilities! Should I focus on student attitudes towards Chemistry? Perhaps I could examine student preconceptions of this particular subject (ie, it's "too hard", it’s "uninteresting"), so that I can work to dispel some of those myths as an educator. On the other hand, I could also assess a possible correlation between methods of classroom instruction (ie, lecture, class-discussion, lab work) and academic performance, to determine what might be an "ideal" learning environment. I am most worried about conducting a study that has been carried out countless times, or perhaps creating an experiment that is too simplistic for a graduate-level course. At the very least, however, I know that I want my study to provide insight as to how I can make Chemistry fun and relevant for students who never thought that they could enjoy it in the first place!
Another challenge I face is that this will be my first study using human subjects! As an undergraduate science major, I've had plenty of lab experience, but those labs did not entail the same level of ethical considerations that are inherent in educational research. I wonder how difficult it will be to obtain test scores or classroom statistics from a legal standpoint? What if I want to administer a survey or small exam to students? Will parents be okay with the notion that their children are my "test subjects"?
This discussion of ethics brings to mind a biology experiment that I conducted last year, in which my lab group accidentally killed one of the snakes that we were observing. About a million questions surfaced in regards to ethical experimentation, and the experience pretty much scarred me for life!! Basically, I am just hoping that everyone gets out of my educational research alive… :)
5 comments:
Casie, Choose a topic your passionate about and we can narrow your interest down to a doable study. One possibility is a pre and post attitude toward science survey and/or conceptual change analysis that is given before and after different types of teaching strategies. While this is not my area of research, I do have several contacts we could email whose interest is in conceptual change. If this interests you, search the education literature for conceptual change. John
Casie, I will be very surprised if your research study kills any students. I don't mind that you killed a snake, but we won't do that to students! You have several good ideas here. I agree with JP that conceptual change is a good option. It might also be interesting to interview students and ask them what they think about chemistry. Then you could identify these "myths" and plan lessons or activities to dispel them. Or you might identify students who do like chemistry and ask they why....
Casie, If you like the idea of conceptual change as your topic, search the authors Posner and Strike. They are the gurus of conceptual change. John
Casie-
Although in I'm in the English cohort I have spent the last 10 years in engineering and particularly in developing technologies. What I was/am most struck by is how young many of the contributors are and how monumental their contributions are already. Your comments made me wonder if one of the avenues you could take to gain insight into student motivation might be an ethnograhpic study of how careers and opportunities for young men and women in science/engineering can have an immediate impact on high school students. You can make a topic more enticing by making it relevant and fun but that doesn't mean that it is identifiable to a student. If a young chemical engineer say, can share her experiences, responsibilities and enthusiasm with students who are within 10 years of age it might make the subject more enticing for a student. I could imagine a study that included such a person presenting or taking Q&A in a class with pre/post-presentation surveys to characterize student attitudes. Definitely more qualitative in nature but you might be to correlate attitudes/interest to such an event. Science/math drive industry making the US relevant to the world socially and economically. If attitudes are set before a student even gets to college that science/math are boring or for nerds then it is that much harder to harvest and encourage all that potential. Worthwhile topic and a great cause!
Looking at your original post, I think that studying the correlation between teaching methods and performance would be a lot more difficult but would be a more useful study. I think that establishing a casual relationship between two things is in general more useful than just studying something like the attitudes of people towards one thing because it is prescriptive.
I don’t know though how much that topic would look at the question of how to make chemistry fun that you want to explore. Perhaps you could switch the focus of that study from looking at the performance observed from each method and change it to how each method influences students opinion of the field.
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