~Looking more specifically at what my SMART board activity will involve.
I had first imagined a problem based learning activity with the classes but have come to the conclusion that PBL brings to many variables into the equation. So I think I will structure the lessons in a way that the students will interact with the material in the lesson through the SMART board. In the classes without the SMART board they will be given the exact same information just without the technology to back it up. So they will essentially be taught by the more traditional white board, with little or no interaction with the material other than just writing the material in their notes. The pre and post tests will assess what knowledge they gained from the lessons.
I also think that the comments everyone has made helped me look at this study a little different. I also think that I could measure qualitatively the motivation of students during the lessons. I could interview students and teachers to measure their interest in the lesson, or I could observe classes and measure the student motivation through variables such as participation, cooperation and receptiveness. I am more inclined to look at this study quantitatively, but I am open to a mix of the two methods.
As I think more about technology I am starting to realize that it comes at a cost. You can’t always rely on the projector to work or a file to open. This leads me to believe that at the core of things you have to be able to use the essentials: overhead and white board. If all else fails you have to be prepared to get the job done whether that's on a fancy SMART board or on a chalk board. Either way the information has to get into the minds of the students.
2 comments:
Andy, There are many different possibilities to research SMART board technology depending on your interests. If you want to merge your interest in technology with my interest in constructivist learning, you could investigate how teachers implementation of SMART board technology aligns with constructivist-based pedagogy. Your method could be a nonintervention quantitative survey aligned to constructivist practices if you want to generalize your results across teachers who use SMART board, or you could conduct a qualitative case study to provide a description of how your participants use of smart boards aligns with constructivist practices. I mention this not to ask you to switch your focus, but to provide you with an example of how your research method is influenced by your research question.
You have come up with a good intervention design for your study, but I am still unclear as to your research questions. Perhaps you have posted this earlier and I missed it. Is your research intended to measuring the effect SMART board has on learning or the activity has on learning? You might want to provide a similar activity (rather than notes) that does not use SMART board technology. For example, the SMART board activity could use an interactive website to model cell division while the control activity could be a similar hands-on modeling activity to teach cell division. You could use your pre/post-tests to measure student learning and attitude quantitatively and conduct interviews and/or observations to provide a qualitative analysis of student learning and attitude.
That being said, I think we need to take a step back and narrow down your topic and refine your research questions if you have not done so. What is your rationale for interviewing teachers for their interest? From your previous posting I think you are able to establish through your literature review how technology connects students to content. Using this as your conceptual framework, what's your topic and research question(s)? Then, does your research design help to answer your research question(s)?
Andy, I agree with JP about your specifying your research question. The SmartBoard is only a tool. You will want to focus on the instructional use of it. The constructivist approach is a good option. If you want to stay quantitative, you would have to design similar constructivist lessons with and without the Smartboard tool, teach them, and assess student learning and compare. This is not a bad model, but it will be very limited in time and a short study usually does not have significant effect. I like numbers as much as you do. But this study might best be the case study JP talks about. You could learn many details from that and share that knowledge. It all depends on how you choose to construct the research question....
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