Reflection Assignment of a Student Learning Objective (SLO)



Reflection Assignment 3 for Student Learning Objectives (SLO)

(SED 697 Dr. Rivas)

By Dean Papadakis

In this reflection assignment, I have selected Student Learning Objective #3, which is stated as follows:

RESEARCH SKILLS by designing and conducting research ethically and effectively and presenting their findings at a professional level in oral and written forms.

The assignment I am selecting is the assignment from Dr. Rivas’s SED 697 “Directed Comprehensive Studies in Science Education”. The assignment that relates to Student Learning Objective #3 was the action research paper. In this assignment, we had to come up with a research question that studied the students in our classroom. Here are the connections to the specific parts of the SLO. I had to design my own research question of the students in my own classroom, which included determining how which methods of data collection I would use. I then had to analyze the data and see how it answered my research question. Along the way, I had to give presentations on each of the five different chapters, in the form of power-point presentation. I learned so much from this assignment. Before this, I had very little experience first of all, with using a power-point program. I also had little experience using the program EXCEL, and this assignment allowed me to become proficient in the making of graphs to visually represent the data that was collected in my classroom. The assignment also included hearing others in my class, give their presentations and this helped me to see what areas were lacking in my own presentations and to see what a truly professional level report looks like. One of the interesting ways we critiqued each other was to bring to class our written reports and we exchanged them with two other classmates. Then each of us had to read the other reports and write down comments about areas that needed improvement. What was most interesting to me was being made aware of areas that needed improvement in my reports that I had just completely overlooked. This showed me that even though I may think of my self as an expert in a certain area, it always valuable to get another opinion or two opinions that will help point out this other areas that we ourselves simply can’t see.

One of the books that very helpful to me in writing my paper was the book, A Short Guide to Action Research (Johnson, 2008). What Johnson did was to give many examples in the book of various types of research questions, and then described some of the details of what we should write about in the various chapters. The overall assignment (writing the research paper) was a lot of work and was very difficult for me, however, I noticed that once I had collected all of the data and started pondering how the data answered the specific research questions, the assignment became much more interesting and I really wanted to find out how things turned out. Even though there were no test tubes or beakers in this research project, it nonetheless became very excited and I started enjoying it much more. Another interesting thing that I found out about myself was that I would get a little nervous before a presentation, even though the audience was comprised of all of my peers that I had been working with for two years. Also, I am in front of students on a daily basis, and I don’t feel nervous in that context. Maybe I felt this nervousness, because I was put into a situation that I was not used to being in. Additionally, I had a chance to see how I had the control over what data I include and what data I exclude, and this relates to the part of the SLO that describes doing the research ethically. I found that it is important to not let the data influence an outcome in an unfair way. By this I mean that if a certain point of view is reached by what the data says, I learned the importance of analyzing the limitations of the data and the importance of mentioning these limitations so that the reader can decide for them-self, if the outcome stated from the data, is a valid outcome. This also has implications for data collected in a real science experiment. Researchers must always be aware of the limitations of their procedures for data collection, and be careful when they are making their conclusions from the data.

Overall, I learned a tremendous number of new things from this research assignment, even after all of these 21 years of being in teaching. I also know how I would do things differently, if I were to ever be involved in another action research study of my students.

One thing I would do is to not wait so long near the end to start analyzing the data. Also, I would try to get more data (even though this would be more work) or rather a bigger sample size, so that any conclusions I come up with would have a better chance of being reinforced by the data.

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