Last Chance to claim insanity...

Ah, the final chapter…er… blog. Writing this blog has been an interesting experience and at times, overwhelming. I’m kind of sorry to see it go. As things are wrapping up and I continue to stress about the research project as a whole, I think I’ve come to some conclusions. As stated previously, I would like to do some research about student attitudes and motivations toward their history classes. I would like to incorporate the issue of gender, which of course makes everything more complicated. Most likely I will be using a series of surveys and possibly a few interviews. I’m having a hard time finding research addressing gender, but I am making headway finding research about student motivation in history classes. Let me know if you come across anything!! It seems that more research is being done about student motivation and gender in science and math classrooms in order to increase women in that particular field. That’s funny to me because I remember having mostly female teachers, except in history.

I still am hesitant to approach this topic because I am afraid, in all honesty, that it will peg me as a “feminist” teacher or a “women’s history” historian. While I don’t perceive either of these ideas as inherently negative, I’m afraid the negative association will affect my career choices. Smaller and more conservative communities may not be impressed with my research topic choice and be hesitant to interview me. Hopefully that will not be the case and I will be able to explain to them my rationale: I see gender playing a role in my classroom and I want to find out more about how to make sure the playing field is level. The best example I can give was my AP US History class. Because of the recent curriculum shifts toward social history, I have found female students are easier to engage in the material (and feel more comfortable with) than my male students. Maybe I’m just thinking too much. Here goes…

Research Question: What are students’ attitudes and motivations in regards to their history classes? Do these factors vary according to gender?

Subjects: 6 classes (2 World History, 2 C&E, and 2 US History)
Note: I can’t decide if I want to have them all be College Prep or vary the levels. Comments?

Methodology: All students would complete a survey about attitude and motivation in their class. These would be followed up with student surveys. I would also like to interview teachers about their own experiences with this issue. Lastly, I would like to observe each class to observe students attitude in class. I think I have too much to do…

Analysis: I would like to use SPSS (yikes!) to work with the survey data and include that with any qualitative data I have gathered, probably using the color-coding method to find common themes.