So after some thought this week, I have been wrestling with some different ideas for my study. My initial idea was to study how teacher expectations influenced student achievement, but I was very unsure how I was going to be able to study that. Dr. McCoy made it seem much more plausible though by suggesting that I look at it from the students’ perspective instead and study how their perception of their teacher’s expectations of them is related to their performance. I feel like this would be a causal comparative study – with student perception of teacher’s expectations being the independent variable and performance being the dependent variable. (Or would it just be correlational?) I could measure student perceptions with some sort of survey or attitude assessment, possible using the Likert Scale, and measure performance by their grade in the class, or perhaps by giving them some sort of standardized achievement test. While I am not 100% sure that this is exactly what I want to study, getting ideas out on the table and actually starting to formulate a plan makes me feel much better about the whole situation!
I also just want to briefly mention the other idea that I have considered this week in case anyone has any thoughts. I am thinking about possibly studying the relationship between a student’s perception of the real world value of math and their math achievement. In other words, does a student who sees how math can actually apply to their life have higher math achievement? This is just something I came up with in the past couple days, so I haven’t given a ton of thought to it, but hopefully by next week I will have some more ideas!
2 comments:
In your last idea about studying the real world value of math, it seems like you and Sarah L. are looking at similar topics. While she talked about doing a survey though, it sounds like the question you pose would be more of a correlational study. It's just like what we talked about in class- a similar topic can be approached from many different angles! I think either approach would be interesting, especially since it seems like math teachers are constantly bombarded with the question "When will we ever use this??"
Jen, you could probably use both of these in the same study, looking at factors that motivate students in math. You could construct a survey that asks students questions about the influence of teacher expectations, parent expectations, and peer expectations, as well as how they see the value of math....
It might be cleaner to stick with expectations...I know there is a lot of related research in that area. Lots of the current successful programs are based on the idea of high expectations = high achievement. You could explore student perceptions of that...
Or if you want to do real world applications, that could work as well....
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