Week Five

How will data collection ‘look’ for me?  

I will begin collecting data by having students take a short questionnaire.  A few of the questions I am thinking about asking are something along the lines of:

1.     If you had to guess, what percentage of homework do you complete in this class?

2.     If the homework assignment was shorter, do you feel like you would do it more often?

3.     What is your overall grade in this class?

4.     Are you satisfied with your overall grade in this class?

5.     If homework were assigned online, would you complete it more often?

6.     Why do you think teachers assign homework?

7.     If homework were worth more than "work ethic”, would you complete more of it?

Next, I will keep a detailed spreadsheet of student’s completion rate and details of the type of assignment it is.  I will then try to decide what type of homework seemed to have higher rates of completion.

When I give a new type of homework assignment out, the following day I will want feedback from the students.  Having a few prepared questions for students to answer will be important.  Some of those questions might be:

1.     Did you complete ____ assignment?

2.     If yes, did you like it more than the traditional type of homework?  Why?

3.     If no, why not?

I would also like to give students the opportunity to talk to me about homework.  I would like to hear their take on it, why they think teachers assign it and what type of assignments they like the most.  I would also like to see if they have any ideas/suggestions for new types of homework assignments.  This type of data collection will be in the form of an interview.  I plan on doing two interviews, one at the beginning of the research and one at the end.

I will also be looking at test scores as we move through the curriculum.  I will want to know if the new homework assignments are having a positive effect on the assessment grades.  Therefore, I will be keeping data on the completion rate of homework and the test scores for each of the chapters we cover.

What challenges am I anticipating?

One of the main challenge I can see, is that I only meet with my students three times a week.  I will have to make sure that I have a timeline for when I am giving questionnaires/surveys and interviews so that I do not miss my window.  I will also need to have these surveys ready to hand to students each week. 

Another challenge that I can see will be that students miss a lot of school due to travel for sports and activities.  This will probably skew my data especially if it was a day with low attendance that I planned to get feedback from students about the homework.

Finally, if any of my homework assignments are technology based, I anticipate that there will be some technical difficulties.  Either students will not have access to the internet or the app we are using that day is not working.  I will need to have an alternate homework that students can do if the technology aspect is not working for them.  I can always fall back on the paper/pencil homework if this happens.