Ok, let’s see here… I know I want to look at the effects of the use of multicultural literature on student achievement and/or attitudes towards class, with an interest in students’ cultural background as well. I am beginning to imagine a research question that might sound something like this (but with a lot of tweaking to make it better and more researchable): “What is the effect of the use of multicultural literature on students’ attitudes towards class and their achievement?” Since I am still having a few issues making concrete decisions about my research, I think that I may have to choose either attitudes or achievement. Any ideas?
Now that you’ve beaten that out of me, I think that there are several ways to tackle the data collection. In order to find out about student attitudes towards class, I will need to survey or interview them. The interviews would yield quite a bit of narrative data, and then I would be able to perform some qualitative data analysis. It would also be helpful to collect data through observation in order to see students in their “natural” habitats. These observations will help me see how students interact with each other, the teacher, and the literature that they read. The data that I collect from these observations will also provide me with more narrative data that I can qualitatively analyze.
3 comments:
Is it to hard to measure how multicultural lit. affects student attitudes and achievement? It could maybe have an effect on student perception of class, but maybe even more plausible, student perception of English (lit., I mean) as a whole.
Funny...i hadn't read your topic yet it is the exact same as mine. I'm not sure if that is problematic or not but I guess we will see. Our methodology is very similar too. I thought that mixed methodology would provide rich data. I think I am going to try and assess student motivation and not student achievement; however, I was reading an article on the topic this weekend that stated that students tend to perform better in areas that are more familiar to them. Therefore, it would seem logical that minority groups may perform better in a classroom environment that is based on or involves elements of their culture.
Amanda, your question is getting better. You should select either attitude or achievement. I don't know how you define multicultural literature and how you will administer it? You also need to decide how you will collect the data.
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