Third time's a charm...

So after some wishy-washiness with my topic, I think I have settled down on exploring how student’s perceptions of teacher expectations affect their motivation and achievement. I initially thought that a survey would be the best way to go about this study; however, I feel like taking a qualitative approach and interviewing students might be more useful because I would be able to gather more specific information from them. It would probably be best to go into the interviews with a more structured approach – questions could include if they respect their teacher, if they feel like their teacher respects them, what kind of expectations they feel their teacher has for them and how they feel these expectations are portrayed, if they feel they are treated differently than other students and how, and if they feel motivated to achieve, just to name a few. Basically, I will be trying to get at the nature of the student-teacher relationship and see if this relates in any way to how motivated a student is to achieve in that class and their performance in the class. Today we talked about the usefulness of focus groups; however, I am unsure if that would be the best approach to this study because I feel like students might be less likely to admit their feelings about a teacher in front of their peers, especially if these feelings are much different from their peers. That said, gaining the trust of the students will be crucial for me to be able to have successful interviews with them. It might be necessary to have ongoing conversations so that we can build this trust.